


Love is Bright but Casts a Shadow (Its Name is Grief)

by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels



Series: i carry your heart with me [i carry it in my heart] [7]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: And Garcy, Angst with a Happy Ending, As Best I Could, Bring tissues, F/M, Heavy Angst, Here's Hoping It All Makes Logical Sense, I Am... So Sorry For This, I Tried to Make Everything Match Up with Journal Canon, M/M, Mostly Flogan TBH, Multi, Prequel, Sequel, Technically Garcyatt But Very Flogan Heavy, Timeline Zero AU, Wyatt Logan's Bisexuality Crisis, Yell At Me I Deserve It, again I'm sorry, yes it's BOTH
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 13:36:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20228713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels/pseuds/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels
Summary: Wyatt Logan has nothing to live for. Then he meets Garcia Flynn. But Flynn—Flynn has found something to die for.





	Love is Bright but Casts a Shadow (Its Name is Grief)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is based on an amazing Timeline Zero video that lostinspiration (koortega on tumblr) made, which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozI4FNV8Olw
> 
> I swore I would write this as a fic in revenge for all the tears this video has made me shed, and lo, I have made good on my promise.
> 
> Additionally, some parts of this were heavily influenced by timeless-season-three on tumblr. Go read it if you haven’t yet, there’s something in it for everyone. Including actually decent writing.

_2019_

Wyatt waited in the Lifeboat, hardly breathing. Rufus sat quietly next to him, eyes on the various beeping and flashing lights of the Lifeboat.

_I don’t like this._ Rufus didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t have to.

Rufus was on board with this because it was the only way to do it, they all agreed on that. But that didn’t mean that this was safe, or sane, or that it wouldn’t turn them all into jelly in a minute.

Wyatt shifted in his seat. He wanted to pace, but he was a little scared of exiting the Lifeboat. Scared of doing anything that might alter the timeline more than they already had.

“Do you think it’s working?” he asked.

Rufus sighed. “Only one way to tell, man, we jump back.”

Wyatt swallowed thickly, his throat dry, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. He wanted to be there, he wanted to see him—he wanted—just one last time, in case it all went wrong—

But he wasn’t the one who could do it. It couldn’t be him.

So he sat and he waited.

* * *

_2003_

Lucy gripped the steering wheel tightly as she went over the words.

“Mom. You know that I love you. And I love history. But I can’t just follow in your footsteps. I want…”

She paused. No, probably best not to bring up the whole band thing. Because it wasn’t really about the band, was it? It was about doing what she wanted with her life, no matter what that thing might be, and—

The car skidded.

Lucy let out a rather undignified shriek as she struggled to get it under control, the wet pavement working against her, shit, she was going into a tailspin—the headlights flashed over cold, unforgiving cement and a black sky and then, suddenly, she was weightless, her stomach lurching, the drop of a rollercoaster—

Weight returned far too quickly as she hit the water, her seatbelt saving her from slamming her forehead against the steering wheel, her neck twinging in pain as she got whiplash, jerking back.

No. No, no, no, no…

It was panic, total panic. Lucy tried to breathe. Get—get her seatbelt undone—the car was sinking quickly and she couldn’t tell what was water and what was the night sky, it was all so dark and pressing in. The door, the door, it wasn’t opening it wasn’t opening it wasn’t oh God oh God oh God it wasn’t—she had to get out, she had to get out—

“Stay calm,” she chanted to herself, “stay calm, stay calm, stay calm…”

She had to get out, but how? How—there was water all around now, holy shit cars sank fast, so much faster than on television, and she couldn’t—the fucking door wouldn’t—

There was a shape outside her window.

Lucy screamed, bursting into tears from shock and fear. It wasn’t a shark, she _knew _it wasn’t a shark, but it was still her first thought like an idiot and she just, she wanted to get out, the car was getting smaller, wasn’t it, it was getting smaller and smaller and she was running out of room to breathe there wasn’t going to be much oxygen left and oh God she could already feel the air thinning she was going to die in here _she was going to die in here_—

The shape was back, and this time—this time she saw it wasn’t a shark.

It was a man.

Lucy reared back from the window through instinct as she caught sight of the gun, covering her head. The bullets were oddly muffled in the water, and didn’t sound at all like she’d thought.

A moment later she heard the welcome, furious cracking of glass, and she peeked up through her fingers. Again, again, hitting the glass with the butt of the gun, until the window finally shattered and water rushed in.

Lucy sucked in a huge breath as the man grabbed her, yanking her through the window. Shards of glass sliced at her clothes and she felt a few stabs of pain but she didn’t care. She clung to the man as he kicked upwards powerfully, and closed her eyes against the terrifying, vast darkness of the water as they rose and rose in counterpoint to the sinking car.

Their heads burst out of the water and Lucy began to cough, crying and inhaling at the same time and nearly vomiting as a result. “Th-th—” she tried, but her teeth were chattering too hard to get the words out.

“Can you swim?” the man asked. He had some kind of accent, Eastern European if she had to guess.

Lucy nodded. “P-please don’t leave.”

“I won’t,” he promised. He took her hand. “Here, you can hold on the whole time. But I need you to kick with me, okay?”

Lucy nodded.

They awkwardly made their way to shore. She could see a car up ahead, headlights pointed at the water—that must’ve been how he could see where to go.

The moment they got onto land her legs gave out, the adrenaline fleeing. She’d nearly died. She would have died, and nobody would’ve known where she was, or how it happened, if that man hadn’t been here.

Her good Samaritan quickly scooped her up, as if he’d been anticipating that her legs would go. Normally Lucy would have been embarrassed by how she hung onto him, but it was bad enough trying to breathe right now. She’d worry about her dignity later.

“I saw your car go over,” the man told her. “You can use my phone to call someone. Do you need an ambulance?”

Lucy nodded. She could feel a persistent sting in several places where the glass had cut her.

“I’ll call you one.” The man sat her down in the driver’s seat of his car, the door conveniently already open, and then went to his trunk and pulled out a blanket. “Take off your clothes and wrap up in this so you don’t get pneumonia.”

He obligingly turned away as Lucy stripped out of her clinging, soaked clothes, then wrapped herself up in the blanket. The heat was blasting and she curled up on the seat, still shivering, unable, somehow, to make herself stop.

The man returned a moment later, hanging up the phone. “Ambulance is on its way. I’ll stay with you until then.”

Lucy nodded. “Thank you, I would’ve—if you hadn’t—”

“But you didn’t,” the man replied. He crouched down in front of her. “Hey, it’s okay. You made it.”

“How did you—you acted so quickly—you have—you have a gun—”

The man grimaced. “I’m, uh, here on assignment. I’m a soldier of fortune, let’s put it that way. I was making sure a package got delivered.”

Lucy eyed him. He didn’t look like a spy. He looked… good, all right, he looked handsome, but a bit gangly, like he was still figuring out exactly what to do with his body, and his slightly shaggy hair and wide mouth gave him a bit of a puppyish look. Still, not the type of guy she would kick out of bed for eating crackers.

“I’ve seen a lot of people in shock,” the man went on. “And it’s okay. The key is to breathe. Can you breathe with me?” He paused. “Tell me your name.”

“Lucy. I’m L-Lucy Preston.”

“Hello Lucy. I’m Garcia Flynn.” He gave her a crooked smile. “So, how about you tell me about you, and I’ll tell you about me. Tit for tat.”

Lucy nodded. “O-okay. I’m—I’m supposed to—to major in history.”

“History’s good, history’s interesting. I wanted to be a history teacher when I was little.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart. What period of history do you like best?”

He kept her talking until the ambulance and the police arrived, the EMTs bundling her off and the officer taking their statements. She saw a glimpse of some official-looking badge that Flynn flashed the officer as he explained how he got Lucy out of the car, but she couldn’t tell whether it was CIA, FBI, or something else entirely. It sure did make the police officer perk up, though.

Then she was being placed in the ambulance, and Flynn was walking back up to her, still in his soaked clothes. “You need to change out of those,” Lucy blurted out. “You’ll get pneumonia.”

He gave her a smile that made her feel warm for the first time since she’d plunged into the ocean. “I think I’ll make it.”

“You’re not coming with me?”

“Duty calls.” He braced his hand against the ambulance door. “Take care, Lucy Preston.”

“You too.” She couldn’t explain why she had the urge to reach out and beg him to stay. She had no hold over him. He had work to do—clandestine work, sure, but still, it was probably more important than comforting one shaken-up college student, and she was in the care of the experts now. Mom and Dad would be on their way in an instant, once Lucy called them. She was fine.

And yet.

But she didn’t reach out. She just smiled, and Flynn smiled back, and then he was gone.

She didn’t see him for another thirteen years.

* * *

_2012_

Wyatt gripped the steering wheel tightly as rage coursed through him like hot acid. “He was hitting on you, Jess, and you’ve got a damn ring on your finger!”

“For the last fucking time, Wyatt, he wasn’t hitting on me—”

“Then why did he get so pissed and defensive?”

“Because you tried to start a fucking bar fight with him!” Jess snapped.

How had it come to this? Wyatt had known Jess his entire life. They’d done everything for each other. He’d worked every single running job across the border to help her pay for her freshman year of college, because a full-ride scholarship didn’t cover room and board, apparently, thanks American school system. They had been high school sweethearts, and best friends before that. They’d fought for each other, and fought together, and Jess had written him countless letters while he was overseas on tour.

She had made the ultimate sacrifice for him.

But now—now it was nothing but fighting, nothing but yelling and bitter, icy silences, and finding new jobs from Delta away from home and Jess finding assignments that took her farther afield and—and he just didn’t know how to fix it.

“You know who you sounded like,” Jess said, her voice quiet but sharp.

Wyatt tightened his grip on the wheel. “Don’t you dare fucking say it.”

“You sounded just like him. Just like your dad.”

“I did not, you have no idea—”

“Yes, you did, Wyatt, you fucking did, and if you won’t go to therapy about it—”

“Just because I’m not going to let some asshole ex-boyfriend flirt with my wife—”

“You’re not even here half the time and then you come back and expect to control me—”

“You’re not here half the time, always with some new article, new news story you just gotta chase it down, and then you turn around and—”

“—but God forbid you cooperate during couples’ counseling—”

“—just like a fucking hypocrite—”

“—but oh no, you’re never wrong, you’re always the hero, I’m just the manipulative bitch—”

“—I never asked you to fucking save me, okay? I never asked for that, you fucking—you chose that, okay? I never asked for it!”

“And I never asked for you to, what, declare a fucking life debt to me!”

Silence fell.

Jess leaned her elbow against the car door, staring out the window. “If you’re just with me because you feel—like you owe me—”

“I’m not, Jess, I’m not, I—I love you, I do, I just—I get angry, I know, I do, I get so angry and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

“You’re always sorry,” Jess replied. “Afterwards, you’re always sorry.”

Wyatt didn’t know what to say to that. His eyes and throat stung.

“Pull over.”

He glanced over at her. “What?”

“Pull over. I’m walking home.”

“Jess…”

“If I stay in this fucking car a second longer I’m gonna kill you, just let me walk home, okay?”

Wyatt jerked the wheel, perhaps a little meanly, making Jess lurch. “Fine, you wanna walk home, be that way.” He slammed the car to a stop on the side of the road, at one of the local parks where Jess liked to go jogging in the mornings.

Jess had her seatbelt unbuckled before the car even stopped, shoving the door open and slamming it so hard the entire car shook.

She didn’t look back as she started walking.

Wyatt hit the accelerator, anger and guilt and shame all churning in him like a hurricane, feeling like he was in five places at once, not just in the present but the past as well, all those moments along the way that had led them to this, both the good and the bad, and the truths and sacrifices that weighed in his chest like a hundred-pound bag of cement.

It took him ten, fifteen minutes to calm down. He always calmed down sooner than Jess did. He ran hot, Jess ran cold, it was how they worked. They complimented each other, dammit, they balanced each other out.

_You sounded just like him. Just like your dad._

Fuck.

He had promised himself he would never be like that sonofabitch. That he’d put all of that behind him.

Maybe… maybe Jess was right, maybe he needed some shrink or something. She’d always been smarter than he was. Fuck.

Wyatt turned on his blinker and turned the car around at the next stoplight, scanning the streets as he drove back. _C’mon, honey, get the in car. You’re right, you’re right about everything, as usual, get in the car and we’ll go home and you can book me a shrink in the morning, okay? Promise. You shouldn’t be out by yourself at night, Jess, c’mon, get in the car._

He peered through the windows as he passed the houses, the gas stations, the grocery store… and reached the park.

Wyatt slowed down almost to a complete stop. Jess should be here somewhere. He should’ve passed her.

Maybe she’d stopped in a gas station to get a drink or something.

Wyatt turned around again and stopped by each of the gas stations, but none of them had seen a blonde matching Jess’s description. Her cell phone was still on the passenger seat beside her.

He started to worry.

He called their landline, in case Jess had gotten a ride from someone and was now at home waiting for him. No answer.

Next he called the police.

Jess had vanished into the ether, gone without a trace, until two weeks later when the police found her body. Strangled, they said. Probably never even got out of the park.

Wyatt had identified her, a hysterical laugh bubbling up because how, how was it possible, he’d only been away for ten minutes, no more than twenty, he was the dumbass, not Jess, Jess was a fighter, how—how could—he’d only been gone twenty minutes—

They never caught the person who did it. But finding out who that bastard was and making him pay was only the half of it. Wyatt knew the other half was on him. He’d argued with her, he’d been a jealous asshole at the bar, he’d refused therapy and couples’ counseling. He’d done this.

He’d killed his wife.

* * *

_2014_

Flynn gripped the steering wheel tightly as his vision blurred, anger and sorrow and shock all warring in his chest like snarling wolves.

_“Mmm, hey, where…”_

_“I thought I heard Iris cough, honey, it’s nothing, I’ll be right back.”_

Iris had been sick a lot as a toddler, of course Lorena would be worried, of course—

He heard cars behind him and wrenched the steering wheel to the side, taking a sharp turn down a side street. Shit, they were tailing him.

_“Would you check for monsters in my closet?”_

How could he have failed them, how could he not have known—he should have heard the strike team enter—

Flynn made another sharp turn and slammed on the accelerator.

Rittenhouse. One word, one damn word and a strike team was invading his house and killing—not just him, no, but his wife and daughter. His five-year-old daughter. All he did was ask a question…

He had to get out of the country. He knew how this worked, they’d blame him for this. All of his hard work, all his connections, the NSA, Homeland, CIA, they were about to be burned. He’d have no one.

He hadn’t even been able to take anything with him. Just the clothes on his back. Iris’s Raggedy Anne doll, his and Lorena’s wedding photos, his mother’s drawings from her time with NASA, all of it… all of it was gone. Nothing to remember them by.

Flynn shoved his grief into the back of his mind, into a tiny chest in the corner of his heart and locked it tight. He didn’t have time for that. Not now. He could grieve later. Right now, he had to get out—just get out.

* * *

_2016_

Wyatt Logan first suspected his wife’s death wasn’t an accident when he finally got the guts up to go through her personal files.

Jess had been an investigative reporter, and her files had remained untouched on her desk since she had died. Wyatt knew he’d been sort of just… lingering in stasis, in limbo, after Jess died. Maybe it would’ve been one thing if she’d died in a car accident, or from a lingering illness, or a heart attack even. But to have her death be caused by someone, for someone to have murdered her, and for him to be unable to serve justice—for them to not even have a goddamn suspect—God, it was infuriating. It left him paralyzed inside.

At last, though, a former colleague of Jess’s had asked Wyatt if he could hand off some old files Jess had, and that had prompted Wyatt to start going through all her shit. Dave had offered to help when he was next in town because Dave was a real stand-up guy that way, but… Wyatt knew this was something he had to do alone.

Jess’s papers were a fucking mess. She’d had some kind of system, organized in her head, but God knew she was the only one who understood it. Wyatt was going through everything trying to figure out which were the papers that Nathan—Jess’s colleague—needed.

Then he found the file.

It was underneath some stuff about a puff piece on a new bakery that was opening. It was papers that seemed to be tracking the financial records of congressmen, with certain words highlighted. One word was highlighted and then circled in red pen: Rittenhouse.

Huh.

Wyatt went to the computer and googled. Rittenhouse didn’t yield much. It was the last name of some guy in the Revolutionary War, but that was about it. What was Jess looking into with this?

Wyatt looked at Jess’s files again.

There were a few names that he recognized, and not in a good way. There was no way he could just walk up to Connor Mason and ask that the guy talk to him. He wasn’t even sure what this article was about. He just knew that if it was hidden underneath a puff piece and had to do with congressmen, it was important, and Jess would’ve wanted someone to follow up on it.

Hmm, there was another name, though. It was just a page printed out from the Stanford University website, some guest lecture from a now-retired professor, Carol Preston.

She wasn’t a Silicon Valley billionaire. It was a drive up from San Diego, but hey, he had nothing but time to kill. He’d just gotten back from a mission and so it’d be a bit before they gave him a new one. And yeah, he knew his superiors were eyeing him sideways for the missions he’d been accepting lately but whatever, it was fine, he was fine.

He put all of Jess’s papers in the car, packed an overnight bag, got Carol Preston’s address, and then dropped off the papers on the other assignment at Nathan’s desk at _The San Diego Union-Tribune _office before hitting the road.

It took him all day to drive up, and he didn’t get into the neighborhood until it was a little past the ‘fashionably late’ hour and into the ‘I’m a creeper’ hour.

Well, he’d come this far.

Wyatt idled in the street, making sure he got the address right, and then double checked all of Jess’s files. It wasn’t much, really. Usually Wyatt could look at Jess’s stuff and get a pretty good idea of she’d been aiming for or at least what her story was about but this didn’t even have a typed-up draft yet. It was just an unconnected series of information.

But his gut told him this was important. For better or for worse, he had known Jess better than anyone on the planet, and she had known him. This was important to her. He just… knew it.

Wyatt got out of the car and walked up to the house.

It was a nice house, with a porch and big bay windows on the first floor. Fancy. This Carol Preston had dough. Probably from her family or her husband, since last Wyatt checked professorial jobs didn’t pay shit.

Feeling like a bit of a weirdo, but still not willing to check into a motel and wait another day, Wyatt rang the doorbell.

From inside came the sound of movement, a muffled exclamation, and then the door was opened by a sharp-cheeked, shining-eyed brunette. Her eyes were dark but they really did seem to shine, like stars, somehow, her rich hair framing her angled face. She seemed to be about four or so inches short than Wyatt, slight in build, but with a kind of brittle strength to her.

She also looked exhausted, wearing an oversized plaid flannel shirt and sweats, two spots of color appearing high on her cheekbones in a suggestion of frustration, not bashfulness, and with circles under her eyes. “Yes?”

“Hey, I’m sorry, I’m—” He cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I’m here to speak to a Carol Preston? Does she still live here?”

“I’m pretty sure we’re the same age,” the brunette replied, “so there’s no need to call me ma’am. And… as for…” Something in her seemed to soften, and then harden again, going brittle. “I’m afraid you’re too late if you want to speak with her. Carol Preston died last week.”

* * *

It had been love at first sight, Mom had always said. Her and Dad.

Lucy believed her.

But did love at first sight have to come at the price of a life?

Carol had been the matriarch of the house. Dad had been the softer, quieter one, the one who taught Lucy how to drive, who helped her with her math homework, who bandaged her scrapes when she fell off her bike. Carol had been the one to mark up Lucy’s history homework before she even got it in front of a teacher, the one who signed Lucy up for extracurriculars like ballet, who talked excitedly about Ivy Leagues.

The girls even had their mother’s last name of Preston rather than Wallace.

Henry influenced his wife in little ways, though, and in some ways, it was good. He softened her. Helped her be more patient. But in some ways, it wasn’t. Like the habit of smoking she’d gotten from him.

Dad had passed away five years ago. Mom had died last week.

It was… it had been… Lucy felt… numb. Like she was just barely holding back the tide of everything she knew she was feeling and so she just flipped a switch and felt nothing instead, so that she could get through everything. The funeral, the well wishes, and now—sorting through all of Mom’s things.

Amy swung between forcefully perky and abject despair, crying in the bathroom one minute and raging against tobacco and nicotine the next and then saying with a smile that they ought to remember the good times—and then starting the whole cycle over again.

She was only twenty-seven, with no idea what to do with her life, so Lucy indulged her. But it was really fucking exhausting sometimes.

Still, Lucy hadn’t been Mom’s caretaker. Amy had. Lucy had been teaching.

Teaching as a history professor. What Mom had always wanted for her. What Lucy herself wasn’t even sure if she wanted.

She was sitting in the middle of a pile of things from a box up in the attic when the doorbell rang. Lucy had been trying to puzzle out this box for ages. Mom was always organized, and all boxes were neatly labeled and categorized. Mom wasn’t one for storing junk.

But all this was… just so haphazard. Pictures of Lucy’s great-grandfather, who’d died in World War I, along with what looked like a half-finished journal from him talking about some kind of plan (hello, delusions of grandeur). A copy of Lucy’s birth certificate. Carol’s high school yearbook. A bundle of letters that appeared to belong to Grandma Ruth, Carol’s mother.

Lucy had been peering at the letters when she’d heard the doorbell. “I’ll get it!” she yelled up to Amy.

Grandma Ruth had died before Lucy was born, so Lucy didn’t know much about her. These letters sounded a bit… off, though. What on earth was Rittenhouse? Some kind of religious sect? One that Mom seemed to want to leave, anyway, and Grandma Ruth wasn’t having it.

The strange man standing on Lucy’s doorstep was cute enough—he looked like he’d be cuter if he let himself give into that puppy kind of look he had going on—and seemed uneasy, shuffling his feet. When Lucy told him that her mother was dead, the guy blanched.

“I’m sorry, I just—my condolences, I mean. I, uh.” He fumbled through a folder he had in his hands. “I just wanted to talk to her, see if she’d ever spoken to someone named Jessica Logan? This would’ve been… four years ago.”

“And you are?” Lucy prompted. Did this guy think he could just show up at her house at ten o’clock at night and start asking questions, no problem?

The guy’s face flushed. “Sorry. Um. I’m Wyatt, Wyatt Logan. Jess was my wife. She was a reporter, I was going through her things and found this.”

He handed Lucy the file.

Lucy flipped through. There were some papers taking about Connor Mason and a few other industrialists, mostly in the tech industry, some major players in the oil industry, memos regarding congressmen…

A name caught Lucy’s attention. Rittenhouse. She knew that.

And there, the final page, a print out of Carol’s bio from when Mom had done that guest lecture at Stanford two years ago, right before the cancer diagnosis.

“I know that name,” Lucy blurted out. “Rittenhouse.”

“Do you know what it means?” Wyatt asked. “Because—sorry, this was just—I think this was an important story, to Jess, and—I know it’s not a lot, I can’t make any sense out of it, but I feel like—like I need to figure this out. For her.”

Lucy eyed him. He did look very earnest. He also looked like he was at the very end of his rope, with stubble and heavy, drooping eyes and messy hair. Lucy didn’t think that Wyatt was even aware of how much of a mess he looked.

She could understand that. He looked how she felt. And she was curious about this Rittenhouse thing.

“Okay.” Lucy opened the door further. “C’mon in.”

* * *

It took him far too long to climb out of the bottle.

He fled to São Paulo, where he considered just biting on a bullet and joining Lorena and Iris—except—except—

Those bastards had tried to kill him, and they’d taken down his wife and child. His family. To die would be to hand them victory. To give them what they wanted.

Somehow, someway, he had to get them back for this. Make them pay.

Pretty much all of his bridges were burned, except for one person: Stiv.

Flynn had known Stiv since the war. Flynn had signed up too young, but Stiv had been right at eighteen, just old enough to join without lying about his age. Flynn had always looked up to Stiv, and so had Matej, Stiv’s younger brother.

They’d both been there when Matej had died.

Flynn had never really said it out loud, but he hadn’t needed to. Stiv had known what he and Matej were. And their shared grief had deepened their friendship. They’d created the security firm together, and when Flynn had fled, Stiv had been the one to help Lorena’s family take care of funeral arrangements. Smooth things over as best he could.

It took a while to reach Stiv, but once he did, they could plan—and Stiv had friends of friends in security at Mason Industries.

Now, they just had to wait for an opening—for someone who knew something and was ready to talk about that something. Flynn wiled away the extra time doing some dirty contracts in South America, building up connections, weapons, and funds. It wasn’t fun. He’d done dirty work before, sure, nobody’s hands were clean in war, but he’d always worked to help the oppressed, to at least make sure he was working to help those who couldn’t always help themselves.

Now… now he was just working for the highest bidder.

He’d stopped being able to look at himself in the mirror a long time ago.

At last, though, at last they got a lead. Stiv heard from someone that Mason was working on a top-secret project, and that his two best were on the case, a Dr. Whitmore and a Dr. Bruhl. But something was going wrong with it. One guy went home from work one day and blew his brains out. Another was checked into a mental hospital. And most recently, Dr. Whitmore just… vanished. Nobody would say where she was.

It was making the entire security team antsy.

“Everyone knows that something’s up,” Stiv said. “Even the people in other departments. Whatever it is, it’s big enough that it can’t be contained much longer.”

“What kind of science could be claiming lives like this?”

“A virus?”

“At a tech company?” Flynn paced up and down the motel room he was renting. He never stayed in one place for long. Working for various insurgent groups and drug cartels tended to earn a man some enemies. “No, no, this would be something more… computer related. You said Dr. Bruhl is the man in charge of this project?”

“Yeah. Project Lifeboat, it’s been codenamed.”

“Well, Dr. Bruhl’s just lost three colleagues. Colleagues that I’m willing to bet were following his orders.” Flynn grinned, his skin feeling stretched too thin over his bones. “Let’s get a hold of him. See if he’s feeling guilty about that.”

* * *

Rufus Carlin drummed his fingers on the desktop and tried to ignore his coworker Jiya Marri a few computers over.

Their first date last year had been a disaster that had Rufus avoiding eye contact with her for a month, and even now he couldn’t even be in the same room as her without wishing the damn time machine worked—and allowed for traveling on your own timeline—so that he could go back and fix it.

But the time machine… well.

The Mothership _worked_. Technically. It just… yeah.

Stanley had been checked into a mental hospital. George blew his brains out. And now Emma was dead.

Anthony wouldn’t even talk about it, and who could blame the guy? Not Rufus, that was for sure. He was nervous as hell for his own test runs as pilot.

But all of this… it was worrying on its own, sure, but Mason was acting… squirrely in a way that didn’t seem like his usual self.

He would brush aside Rufus’s concerns, something he’d never, ever done. The guy once flew halfway across the world to help Rufus work through a panic attack while Rufus was attending M.I.T. Connor Mason might have some issues with, ah, delusions of grandeur and playing God, just like all billionaires, but he was also capable of great empathy. Or so Rufus had always seen.

Now, though, he was taking a sharp left turn into Elon Musk behavior and Rufus was not for it, not at all.

Was it Emma? She had always been one of Mason’s favorites. Really, Emma had been everyone’s favorite. Funny, sharp-witted, quick thinking, capable, a real take-charge person. Rufus had admired her and considered her a friend.

Had her loss sent Mason off into the deep end?

Or was it the weird late-night meetings that Rufus had noticed on Mason’s schedule? The phone call from a blocked number that Rufus had seen on Mason’s cell phone right before Mason had shooed him out of the office? The fact that Mason hadn’t told the government or anyone about what he was doing, and the strangely large influx of funds to the project, the fact that all other areas of Mason Industries were being neglected?

Rufus didn’t know what was going on, but there was _something_.

And he was going to find out.

* * *

Jiya smiled up at Anthony as he passed her desk. The poor man had been so cut up over Emma’s death. Well, who wasn’t? But Anthony had _been _there. He’d seen it.

The past was dangerous, when it became your present. And there were so many little things that they just weren’t prepared for.

“You taking another smoke break?” Jiya asked.

Anthony nodded. He kept glancing around, almost like he was avoiding her gaze—or, like he was trying to keep an eye on everyone in the room. “Yes, I’m… sorry. The stress and all, you know.”

He looked down, checking his phone, then gave Jiya a distracted smile and walked quickly out of the docking bay.

Huh.

Jiya didn’t like to be too suspicious, but… this seemed to be more than just the usual upset after losing a close friend and colleague.

Jiya watched him leave and made a very impulsive decision.

She got up and followed him.

Anthony was walking in that trying-to-be-subtle way that people got when they wanted to walk quickly but also avoid attracting attention. Jiya kept a steady pace behind him, pausing to say hello to colleagues, keeping him just on the edge of her vision. Just out of sight.

When Anthony got outside, Jiya assumed he would go around the corner to smoke or get into his car—but he didn’t.

Instead he walked to the next-door parking lot, the one for Google, and got into a car there.

Jiya quickly followed, peering through the bushes.

There was a man in there with him. Tall, sunglasses, dark hair. Jiya grabbed her phone out and took a few pictures as the men talked—and Anthony showed him some papers.

Uh oh. Jiya was willing to bet those papers were supposed to be staying in the hanger bay and not taken out for any reason. Not even for Anthony.

Working off her hunch, Jiya hurried back to the office and ran a search on the guy’s face. Mason technically wasn’t supposed to be able to access things like, say, Homeland Security but he had always encouraged his tech protégées to push themselves, and Jiya knew that the tech she had at her fingertips could get her just about anywhere and anything.

But she was surprised at how quickly a match came up.

What the hell was Anthony doing talking to number two on the FBI’s Most Wanted List!?

* * *

Wyatt took a deep breath and straightened out his suit, then knocked on the office door.

The woman who opened it was just like her picture: stern looking, but not unkind, with thick, long dark hair and skin like dark gold, her eyes dark and deep like the spaces between the stars.

“Denise Christopher?” Wyatt asked, just to confirm. The files gripped tightly in his hand seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

He and Lucy and Amy had done their research. Denise was as clean as they came.

He hoped.

She nodded at him. “Wyatt Logan, Delta Force?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

They shook hands, and Denise opened the door further. “Come in. Have a seat.”

* * *

She confronted Anthony on his way out to his car that night. It was dark, nobody else was around, the parking lot security cameras didn’t pick up sound, and she could make a quick getaway in her own car if things went south.

“Y’know,” Jiya said, stepping out of the shadows as Anthony just reached his car door, “there are easier ways to get yourself in jail besides cavorting with a guy who’s on pretty much every terrorist watch list in existence.”

Anthony dropped his car keys. “Jiya.”

“I saw you today.” Jiya shrugged. “And hoo boy, that lunch friend of yours, he’s a real piece of work. Homeland, CIA, NSA, FBI, and that’s just the U.S. agencies.”

Anthony’s face went pale, the blood draining from it, his eyes going wide. “Jiya…”

“I trust you, Anthony. Or I want to trust you. But we’re building a… well, you know what we’re building. And three people have gotten hurt on your watch. Stanley’s lucky he just went insane.” Jiya stopped a few feet away from him. Anthony didn’t have a weapon on him that she could see, and she was pretty sure that her younger, stronger body could handle him if he went at her, but there was always her heart murmur—and desperate men were capable of crazy things when the adrenaline kicked in. “Are you… did you…”

“What, you think I’d hurt them? Any of them?” Anthony shook his head. “Jiya, no. I would never. They were—it was complicated, for all of them.”

“We have only your word for how Emma died.” Jiya folded her arms. “I want to believe you, you’re a friend, but—you’re talking to a known terrorist!”

“It’s not like that.”

“I need to tell Mason. I should’ve told him already.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Jiya shrugged. “I figured I’d talk to you first. Get you out of whatever crazy scheme Garcia Flynn has roped you into.”

“Garcia Flynn hasn’t roped me into anything.” Anthony beckoned her closer.

Unsure if she was signing her own death warrant, Jiya stepped in until they were just inches apart.

“You have to understand,” Anthony whispered. “Connor’s the one who’s got a crazy scheme.”

“It’s a bit late to back out if you don’t want to build a time machine.”

“Where do you think he got the funds?” Anthony asked. “How do you think he was able to build the Mothership so quickly? He didn’t get it from the government. There’s been no public announcement. Musk’s been yelling about his Space X program to anyone who will listen and Connor hasn’t let even a whiff of this get out, why do you think all of that is?”

“I assume you’re going to tell me.”

Anthony pulled some papers out of his inner jacket pocket. “Connor’s been getting his funding from some group called Rittenhouse. I had heard… things, not a lot, but a bit. As the scientist in charge of the project Connor had to let me in on some of the demands from Rittenhouse. They’re agreeing to fund the project but we have to give them unlimited and exclusive access to the Mothership whenever they ask. Look.”

Jiya looked at the papers. It was a contract—one signed by Connor Mason. “Where did you get this!?”

“Connor’s office. I stole it.”

“Mason wouldn’t be this stupid.”

“If you looked up Garcia Flynn, you saw his records pre-terrorism, right?”

“Yeah. NSA Asset, fought in pretty much every war out there, he had friends all over the place. Half his files were blacked out, I would’ve had to do some fancy hacking to get the non-blacked-out versions.”

“He was looking into Mason’s funding. Seems the government got suspicious about his finances. He found Rittenhouse and his family was murdered as a result.”

“Report says he killed them.”

Anthony gave her a sad look. It was the kind of look Jiya hated—the _oh you sweet summer child, you really think that_ look. “Rittenhouse did it, tried to get him too, when it failed they framed him, figured he’d be dead within a month.”

“So now he’s teaming up with you?” Jiya folded her arms. “For what?”

“Finding a way to stop Rittenhouse,” Anthony said. “And keeping them from getting their hands on that time machine.”

* * *

Rufus paced back and forth in Mason’s office.

“Connor, hey, what’s Rittenhouse?” he practiced under his breath. “No, no… hey, Connor, how’s it going? Say, have you signed over your life’s work and all of our souls over to a shady possibly-government-connected company lately?”

Movement outside of the building caught his eye. Rufus paused in his pacing, tilting his weight to the left to get a better view through the window.

It was late. Mason was muttering about something with Anthony but they were the only two in the building besides the night security staff. So who was out there skulking around the premises?

Rufus glanced over at Anthony and Mason. The two men were really getting into it about the schematics of something or other, probably how comfortable the chairs were, who even knew. Point was, they’d be at it for ages. He had time.

Rufus slipped out of the office and down the stairs, across the hall, and outside. “You!” he hissed at the figure. “Hey, you!”

The person was smaller than he’d thought, skinny, slight, possibly a teenager? Rufus didn’t know. They were wearing all black clothing, including a hoodie. If it was some punk who just wanted a look at Mason Industries or something, he could handle that.

So when the person took off running, Rufus took off after them.

“Stop!” he yelled. “I just want to talk! Hey! Kid!”

The person skidded to a halt and whirled around, their hood falling off to reveal—a fully grown woman, with dark shining eyes and thick dark hair pulled back.

Rufus stumbled to a stop as the woman glared at him. “Kid!?” she said. “I know I’m only five foot five but really!?”

“Uh, ma’am,” Rufus stumbled.

“Oh, God, no, not ma’am, it makes me feel like I’m my mom.” The woman rolled her eyes, then stopped. “Hey. Hey, you’re Carlin, you’re one of the engineers, right?”

“H-how—”

“Employee database, you’re on the website.”

“Oh, yeah, right.” Being Connor Mason’s protégé did lend itself to putting you in the spotlight from time to time. “Just call me Rufus.”

They stared at one another for a moment in painfully awkward silence, until Rufus couldn’t take it anymore and blurted out, “Are you Rittenhouse?”

“What? No!” The woman looked offended, then stuck her hand out. “I’m Lucy Preston. My—my father is, apparently.”

“My boss is being blackmailed by them, apparently.”

They shook hands. Lucy grinned at him. “Hey, you want to meet my friends?”

* * *

In Jiya’s opinion, there was only one person who could possibly go to Mason and talk to him about all of this, and that was Rufus.

She was hesitant to bring it up with Rufus, if only because of their, ah, disastrous date last year. Jiya still wasn’t sure how something she’d been looking forward to so much could’ve gone so horribly sideways, but there it was. She’d felt like Rufus was trying too hard, leading to awkwardness instead of the ease that should’ve been there.

They made such good friends, and she was—well, Jiya had quickly realized growing up that she wasn’t the kind of person who could look at a person, or even just have a quick conversation in a bar with them, and want to fuck them. For years she’d grown up thinking she was just slow to hit puberty. Slow to understand. Then she’d thought she was broken. With some kind of wire loose.

Now she understood—she just needed to be in love, to have that deep emotional connection, before she wanted to do anything sexual.

So if _she _was being more smooth about this damn coworker crush thing than Rufus was, that was fucking saying something.

But—romantic awkwardness aside, they had bigger problems. And she had to swallow her personal feelings and go to Rufus because who else could get Connor to listen?

She walked up to his desk at lunch, just as Rufus was starting to save his files before he went out to grab something to eat. “Hey, Rufus, you got a sec?”

He looked up at her, that goofy grin spreading over his face. “Yeah, hey, of course, always, I mean—for a coworker, y’know, no problem, ha, ha. Anyway. Um. What’s up?”

“I was thinking we could grab lunch and talk about it? I have a problem I need your help on.”

“Does it need the computer because—”

“Nope, no, no computer, we can draw on napkins, kick it old school.”

Rufus laughed and stood up. “Yeah, okay, sure. I’m meeting some friends for lunch, but I think it’d be okay if you joined.”

Once they were safely out of Mason Industries and at a local In n Out, Jiya explained. “And Anthony—I get that he’s desperate, but he can’t really trust this Flynn guy, can he?”

“Maybe he can.” Rufus pulled out his phone and showed her some pictures. “I’ve been worried about Mason, I know something fishy’s been going on with our financial backers, and I ended up talking to someone else—she just found out that her biological father is a member of this group called Rittenhouse, and she and her friend have reason to suspect that this Rittenhouse group murdered a journalist who was trying to make their group known to the public. I’ve seen their name in some of these financial records…”

Jiya tapped wildly on the phone screen. “That’s—that’s the contract, Anthony showed me, between Mason and Rittenhouse!”

“I can introduce you to my team,” Rufus said. “They’re working with a Homeland agent now, she seems legit. Tell her what you found.”

“Don’t you think we should unite the two teams?” Jiya said. “Shouldn’t all the people who are working against Rittenhouse be working together?”

“Wait, who else is working against Rittenhouse?”

Jiya turned to see an older woman standing there, dressed in a charcoal gray suit, tilting her head to the side in an expectation of receiving an answer.

“Ah, Jiya,” Rufus said, “this is the Homeland agent I was telling you about. Agent Christopher, this is Jiya.”

Agent Christopher raised her eyebrows. “Who else is working against Rittenhouse?”

“You’re not gonna like it,” Rufus said. He looked at Jiya.

Jiya sighed.

* * *

Wyatt settled into his seat, feeling self-conscious as everyone else sat down. This was their first official meeting as a whole group, in a proper office, not in Lucy and Amy’s kitchen.

Lucy herself was seated towards the head of the table, Amy next to her. Rufus Carlin, one of the scientists for the Mothership, was on the other side, and next to him was Jiya Marri, another computer tech on the team. Denise was standing at the head of the table.

This was the whole gang.

And then Denise said, “We’re going to be adding two people to the team. One of them is the project leader on the Mothership, Dr. Anthony Bruhl. He can’t make it tonight since he has to oversee work on the Mothership and can’t easily get away, but he is with us in spirit.”

The door to the meeting room was opened, and a tall, broad-shouldered man walked in, looking about as awkward as Wyatt felt.

“This is Garcia Flynn, NSA asset in Eastern Europe.”

Wyatt felt an odd smile sort of tugging up the corners of his mouth as Flynn walked up to them. The guy looked… nothing like what Wyatt had pictured. He was scruffy, with stubble and his dark, soft hair flopping a bit into his face, wearing a black jacket zipped up over a light gray shirt and carrying a messenger bag.

His eyes were dark green, and the most mesmerizing things Wyatt had ever seen.

Wyatt had heard about Garcia Flynn. What Delta agent hadn’t? Flynn had never been U.S., not strictly, but he’d had friends in high places. His security firm was listed as a place to go and get hired when you were sick of Delta, sick of the government paycheck and the crappy hours.

That had all gone up in smoke two years ago when he’d murdered his family and gone on the run. Psychotic break, or so they’d claimed. There’d been paperwork showing therapy appointments, pills in the bathroom, the whole nine yards.

This man didn’t look at all like a brutal murderer. He looked…

Wyatt told himself he didn’t care how Flynn looked.

Flynn sat down next to Wyatt, slinging the back off his shoulder. “Flynn here is an example of what happens when you get in Rittenhouse’s way,” Denise said.

Flynn didn’t say anything. Wyatt himself was unsure if he should speak, or stay silent, or even if he should look the guy in the eye.

Denise turned to Rufus and began asking him about something, but Wyatt—he couldn’t stop looking at Flynn. Like a magnet.

“I heard about your family,” he said quietly.

Flynn looked up, into Wyatt’s gaze, and the fire that blazed there was draconic. Before he could say anything, Wyatt quickly added, “They murdered my wife. She was a reporter. Got too close.”

The fire banked a little, and Flynn’s shoulders relaxed. “Then you know.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Mr. Logan,” Denise said, “I’m not your high school math teacher but I will give you a quiz at the end if it’ll help you pay attention.”

Wyatt’s ears burned as he swiveled around to face Denise. He might have imagined it, but he thought he saw the ghost of a smile flit across Flynn’s face.

* * *

When Lucy saw him, her mind filled with white noise.

“Are we sure we can trust him,” Denise had asked. This had been when they’d discussed whether they should bring Flynn onto the team.

“He saved my life,” Lucy had blurted out.

Flynn was on the team now. In the flesh.

The years had been both kind and cruel to him. Kind in that the sort of gangly, puppyish atmosphere had been done away with. Before he’d been clay but now he was marble, finely curved edges, hair cut a bit shorter, his movements graceful but coiled like a jungle cat.

_Like a fine wine, _she thought, and then hated herself for thinking that.

Because the years had also been cruel, and cruel in the sort of unthinkable way that still made Lucy stagger. There was a heaviness to him, and an anger to him, that had not been there thirteen years ago when he’d saved her from the cold tendrils of the Pacific. That Flynn had not had a hard edge, he had not worn grief like a sweater. He looked like his very bones were aching.

Lucy wanted to run to him, to say _you helped me in my darkest moment, let me help you in yours_. She wanted to do something, anything, both in repayment and out of basic human compassion, that empathy that echoed his pain inside of her—the same pain she saw inside of Wyatt when he spoke of Jess.

She saw the two men looking at each other, saw them whispering, and she knew—they shared a bond that she didn’t. Her mother hadn’t been murdered. Carol had an affair with a Rittenhouse man, years ago. Lucy was the result of that. That was her tie. But Carol had gone on to live a normal life. Carol probably had no inkling of the kind of bullet she’d dodged. Lucy wasn’t here out of grief.

Maybe Wyatt could help him, where Lucy couldn’t.

But afterwards, she couldn’t stop herself from going up to him. “Garcia?”

Flynn started a little, and Lucy had a wild moment wondering when the last time was that he’d heard his first name. “Lucy.”

“I—I’m sorry,” she said. “For your loss. I know you’ve probably heard that—a lot—”

He gave her an odd smile. It hurt to look at. “I haven’t, actually. Seeing as everyone blames me for their deaths, no, people haven’t really been rushing to give me their condolences.”

“Oh. I… I didn’t mean…”

Flynn seemed to realize how harsh he sounded. “I—no. I’m simply. I’m sorry. I think grief has made me… brittle. But. I’m sorry about your mother.”

“Don’t be. It was—nothing like—”

“All grief hurts, no matter how it comes.”

Awkwardness settled over them. Lucy found herself twisting her fingers over and over around each other, an old nervous habit. “Thank you again. For saving my life.”

Flynn rubbed the back of his neck. “It was—anyone would have done the same.”

“Did you—did you ever get your package delivered?”

Flynn gave a short bark of amused laughter, and then lifted up his shirt, revealing a small, circular scar on his left hip. A bullet wound. “Not without incident. But yes.”

He dropped his shirt again, and Lucy found herself smiling and blushing and startled and—warm, unbearably warm, all at once.

Flynn smiled back at her—and then seemed to freeze. His eyes grew dark and shuttered. “I’ll see you at our next meeting, Lucy.”

Before Lucy could ask what the hell she’d done wrong, Flynn was turning and walking quickly away.

* * *

They needed a plan. A way to nail Rittenhouse cleanly. That was very important to Denise. “If our paperwork isn’t right then they all go free and we’re neck-deep in shit.”

He ended up spending a lot of hours up late at night, shuffling through papers. Far later than the others. Amy had nursing school, Lucy had classes to teach and papers to grade, and Rufus and Jiya couldn’t be too obvious, couldn’t draw Rittenhouse’s attention.

That left Wyatt and Flynn.

He understood Flynn’s push to keep going over papers, to just keep pushing. Wyatt felt it himself. For Jess, for Lorena, for Iris, they had to. It was more than just ideology, more than just honor. It was revenge, it was justice, it was finding a way to sleep at night.

And, okay, so maybe he grew to… look forward to his time with Flynn. To treasure it, even. It was silent except for the two of them in the Homeland meeting room, the occasional cleaning staff or security person walking by and waving hello, so it felt like they were the only two people in the world. The silence was companionable. Comfortable.

Jokes over the bad coffee in the break room down the hall led to Flynn coming in one day with an espresso maker. Wyatt teased him about his fancy European sensibilities until he nearly orgasmed over his first taste, and then Flynn never let him live it down. They took a break for half an hour one time and made paper airplanes, competing to see whose could fly the farthest. They did a late-night run to a local 24-hour diner, where Flynn made horrified noises over how much syrup Wyatt put on his pancakes and Wyatt told Flynn if he ate twenty pieces of bacon he was going to die of heart failure.

Wyatt couldn’t even say what it was—he just knew that when Flynn peeked at him over their papers, his heart beat faster. He couldn’t ever seem to look away from the guy. It was like Flynn was an oncoming hurricane and Wyatt knew he needed to run and get somewhere safe, but he just couldn’t keep from staring, rooted to the spot, embracing destruction because he was caught up in awe of it.

It was only a matter of time until things got personal.

Wyatt started bringing a six pack that they’d slowly work their way through, taking breaks to shoot the breeze or bitch about how by the book Denise wanted to do this.

“Can’t we just go in there and steal the damn thing?” Flynn asked once, two beers in. “I mean, that’ll keep it out of Rittenhouse’s hands.”

“Yeah, and what would you do with it?” Wyatt replied. “I think… we should destroy it. Just blow it up.”

“That won’t stop Rittenhouse.”

“Yeah but it’ll keep them from having a time machine.”

At one point, Wyatt asked—blaming it on the beer, or the coffee, or it being two in the morning, or some combination, “What made you become a soldier?”

Flynn paused in the middle of writing something in a notepad. He was always writing down plans for a more frontal attack, plans that Denise would ultimately reject after much arguing. Flynn’s patience was wearing thin and frankly so was Wyatt’s. You couldn’t trust the U.S. judicial system to get these men in jail where they belonged. You couldn’t trust them to really lose their power.

Sometimes, in his darkest moments, Wyatt agreed with Flynn—that the only way to really stop Rittenhouse was to snuff them out.

And then he’d look at himself in the mirror and wonder what sort of person he’d become.

“My father had just died,” Flynn said. “And I believed in my country, in what we were fighting for. I wanted to—I don’t know. I had a lot of complicated feelings about him. So instead of dealing with them I signed up. I was too young, so was my best friend, but that didn’t matter to us. Mattered to my mother. You should’ve heard the fights.” The corner of his mouth ticked upwards, and that told Wyatt all he needed to know about Flynn and his mother. “But I was determined.”

“After that?”

Flynn shrugged. “My best friend died in that war. And I… was angry at the world. I told myself that if I was on the right side, that side that liberated people, helped people, then I was doing the right thing. That it was okay.”

“Yeah.” Wyatt pushed a few pieces of paper around. “I… I told myself that I was fighting for freedom. That it was the only way out of my town, because I wasn’t like Jess, I didn’t have something else to get me out of there, and it was that or get deeper into the drug trade and I didn’t want that.”

“Drug trade?”

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, I know I don’t look the type.”

“Nobody looks the type,” Flynn replied, his voice barely audible.

Wyatt fiddled with his empty beer bottle. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

“Matej,” Flynn said. “He was sixteen. He was…” He paused, cleared his throat. “He was my Jess.”

_Oh_.

Wyatt felt his entire body heating up, like he was that poor suckered frog that was in that gradually heating water only now he had just realized it was boiling and it was too late for him to get out.

To lose just one love of your life—Wyatt knew that, understood that. To lose not one, but two? And a child?

“How are you even standing?” he blurted out.

Flynn let out a sardonic chuckle. “Who says I am?” he replied.

That was the moment Wyatt knew—knew that he wasn’t staring at the hurricane from far away, but from inside it, from the eye of it, the storm raging around him, and he was sunk. Drowning. Gone.

* * *

Sometimes, they fought.

“Jesus Christ, Wyatt, I suggest that you might have had a crush on James Bond, that doesn’t equal you flipping the fuck out on me—”

“Just stop it, just stop getting in my head, okay!?”

“I’m not in your head, that’s the whole problem, you spineless idiot, how the hell am I supposed to even know what mental backflips you’re doing with yourself if you won’t talk to me!”

Sometimes Wyatt yelled. Sometimes they both yelled. One time Wyatt broke down and was only able to repeat _he’d kill me, Garcia, he’d fuckin’ kill me_, and Flynn pulled him into a hug so hard and tight that Wyatt didn’t have room to float away and he could breathe again, and he spilled everything, about the time his dad set his VHS copy of _Goldfinger _on fire and told Wyatt he’d do the same to his hand if he ever caught Wyatt jerking off to it again, and that he’d made himself vomit by sticking his fingers down his throat every time his eyes strayed in the locker room or when looking at a billboard, or at the movie theater, any time, trying to train himself not to want it, not to look at it, to stick just to girls because girls were wonderful and why was he being greedy anyway.

And Flynn held him, crushed them together, like fossilization, the soft calcium of bone being seeped through and transformed into rock, the two creations melding, merging, earth turning into body and body turning into earth.

One time it was Flynn, punching a wall, fire searing his eyes, his teeth bared like a starving wolf, demanding why they were taking so long, why they had to be careful, wanting to burn it all, and Wyatt grabbed Flynn’s wrists and pressed their foreheads together and whispered _fight me, huh, fucking fight me, c’mon, let’s get it out of you, _and instead of fighting Flynn just started crying and couldn’t stop and Wyatt held him and they ended up on the ground, clinging, and his shirt got soaked and smelled like Flynn for days.

It was ugly. It was raw. It was jagged, broken pieces of glass cutting him from every angle.

And he loved it, God he loved it, he needed it, him, Flynn, and Wyatt wouldn’t give up a second of it for anything.

* * *

“How did you deal with your father?” Wyatt asked.

“How’d you deal with yours?” Flynn replied.

“I didn’t.” Wyatt ran his finger around the mouth of the bottle over, and over, and over again. “Jess did.”

Flynn said nothing. He was good at that. Just sitting in patient, pensive silence until Wyatt found his words from where they’d scattered all over his mind.

“I ran away,” Wyatt said. “Drove my dad’s car into a lake and started running moonshine across the border. But my old man—he wasn’t going to let that lie. No sir. I was like… a fuckin’ rabbit, y’know, jumping at shadows and shit.

“So Jess… she stopped by the house, got my dad good and drunk, waited for him to go to sleep—I think she put something in his drink, y’know, a sleeping pill—and she… she smothered him. Put a pillow over his mouth and put her whole weight on it and just… held it there.”

Flynn didn’t say anything. Wyatt began to pick at the label of his beer bottle. “She was always—I saw things in black and white. I needed… rules. After my dad—I never knew who was coming home, y’know? He’d turn on a dime. And I needed… stability. I needed to know the layout. But Jess—she was different. She cared about the truth and about justice and if conventional morality… she always said, her morality was entirely subjective. _I don’t deal in absolutes except the truth_. I remember that. She was okay with—with lying or cheating or murder, depended on the situation, y’know? And to her—to her, buying my freedom was worth—what my old man had done, that earned him death. There wasn’t any other way. Not to her.”

Wyatt paused, the words heavy on his tongue. Would Flynn know what he meant by them? All that he implied?

“You remind me of her,” he said. “You two look nothing alike, you sound nothing alike, but… you’re a lot like her.”

Flynn set his empty beer bottle down on the table. Wyatt didn’t know when Flynn had even drunk his beer. He couldn’t remember.

Flynn looked up at him, _into _him, and Wyatt knew—Flynn heard what Wyatt was saying.

Wyatt didn’t know when Flynn finished his beer, but he knew precisely when Flynn got up. When Flynn walked slowly around the table. When he braced his hand on the table, right next to Wyatt’s hand, and bent down, his other hand wrapping around the arm rest on Wyatt’s chair.

He knew every single inch of space that was slowly erased between them as Flynn leaned in.

Flynn kissed so much more gently than Wyatt anticipated, the hurricane turning into a light summer’s breeze, a zephyr, and that was the moment of Wyatt’s true breaking, the moment that everything fell to pieces into the fire. Like glass, burning and burning until it melted, each kiss reforming him, reshaping him, until by the time Flynn pulled away, he wasn’t the same Wyatt anymore. He was something, someone, new. Someone created by Flynn’s touch. Flynn’s fire.

Flynn tasted like home.

They breathed harshly, even though they hadn’t even kissed all that hard. Wyatt thought he might actually collapse.

Then he pushed himself up to standing and he wasn’t sure what he was doing, it had been four years since he’d kissed anyone and never a man, but he just had to—he was starving, he had to—and Flynn responded.

Wyatt was staying with Lucy and Amy, so going back there wasn’t an option. They ended up at Flynn’s crappy, government-funded motel room instead, since Wyatt suspected if they had sex on the table that Denise would know, no matter how well they cleaned it up afterwards.

They didn’t actually have sex, though. Not that night. He couldn’t. Not—not yet. Fear and self-loathing and bile rose up in him and he couldn’t—he had to—and Flynn stopped, and just held him, and said _okay, we’re just going to sleep, it’s okay, you’re okay_.

“I want to,” he said. His voice sounded rough and raw and burning, the way it did after he would make himself vomit. “But I can’t.”

“You never have to,” Flynn replied. “You never have to, if you can’t.”

They slept in the same bed, though. Flynn on his chest, Wyatt against his side, one leg in between Flynn’s, Flynn’s arms around him, his head on Flynn’s shoulder.

Glass shattered, jagged, now being melted down, reshaped, rejoined, made into something new. _Home_.

* * *

Rittenhouse stole the Mothership.

Cahill himself didn’t do the stealing. He wasn’t the type of guy who would get his fingers directly dirty like that. But he had a team break in, hold Anthony at gunpoint, and steal it. Now Cahill was on his way with some dickwad named Neville and basically using this as an excuse to take over Mason Industries.

It was clever, Wyatt had to give them that. Now Cahill could play the good guy and use the government in his favor while his team went around doing whatever he wanted with the Mothership, and the U.S. government had no idea—except for Denise, who was getting blackballed by Neville at every turn.

“What are they planning?” Denise demanded of Mason.

“The guy just had his life’s work stolen,” Rufus replied, the alarms still blaring all around them in the hanger bay. “Could you give him a break!?”

“Mr. Mason invented a time machine and chose not to tell the government about it until it was stolen by terrorists,” Denise snapped. “Forgive me if I’m not feeling inclined to be patient with him.”

“They want to use it to reshape history,” Mason said, his voice weary. “To get the world even more under their control.”

“So we’re fucked,” Amy said brightly.

Lucy gave her sister a stern look. Amy shrugged. “Unless you’ve got a backup?”

Mason’s eyes lit up. “The Lifeboat. It’s only designed to take three, but it has a foolproof tracking system. It was our first prototype, and now we have it on standby in case the pilots were stranded with the Mothership. We could send the Lifeboat after them to pick them up. Wherever the Mothership goes, the Lifeboat can track it.”

“Rittenhouse is going to be controlling everything in minutes, we have to get out of here, and with the Lifeboat.” Denise pointed at Rufus. “You’re the pilot. I want you, Wyatt, and Lucy.”

“Why not Flynn?” Wyatt said—at the same time as Lucy.

They looked at each other, and Wyatt read it in her eyes. They were both glass being molded by the same fire.

They looked away.

Wyatt hadn’t—he and Flynn hadn’t—told anyone, about—whatever it was between them. The thing what Wyatt still didn’t dare name. Kisses had been growing bolder. Hands had wandered. He’d made out with Flynn for an hour one night, Flynn pinning him to the table, until Wyatt had thought he might actually combust. They’d kissed against walls, rutting and grinding until they came, and one time they took a shower together—well, they had taken a few showers together, but this was the only time it got sexual, Flynn asking permission and then wrapping his hand around Wyatt as he ground up against him from behind, whispering all kinds of promises in Wyatt’s ear.

They were getting somewhere. Slowly. And if Lucy suspected where Wyatt was now spending half his nights, she didn’t mention it.

Guilt still burned in his chest, though.

“We need one soldier to stay behind. Flynn needs to stay with me so I can explain his presence if necessary. Lucy needs to go in case the Lifeboat ends up in a time you didn’t plan. And you need a soldier for protection.” Denise’s tone made it clear that this wasn’t up for debate. “Now get a move on.”

“Amy,” Lucy said, grabbing her sister. “Stay safe.”

“I’m always safe.”

“Sure you are.” Lucy hugged her sister tightly.

“I’ll get the Lifeboat to a secure location,” Rufus said.

“The Mothership’s jumped!” Jiya yelled, struggling with something on the computers. “To the 1950s, looks like Alabama…”

Denise rubbed at her temples. “Okay. Same team but go to Alabama.”

“How long will we be there!?” Lucy asked, clutching onto Amy’s hands tightly.

“Until you can figure out what Rittenhouse is doing and stop them,” Denise ordered. “Now, go!”

Wyatt looked at Flynn, who nodded grimly. Wyatt wanted to—to say something, to touch him, and he knew that nobody would judge them but he still couldn’t stop the fear that prickled up in his spine and instead of doing anything he turned away, hurrying after Lucy and Rufus to the Lifeboat.

He could’ve been wrong, but it felt like Flynn’s gaze was on his back the entire time.

* * *

The good part about their trip: Rufus got to meet Martin Luther King Jr. and several other heroes of his.

The bad part: literally everything else.

They landed back in the present in the middle of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, where Rufus was able to call Denise to pick them up.

Wyatt threw up staggering out of the Lifeboat. “The Mothership was a smoother ride,” Rufus admitted.

When Denise arrived, she looked grim. It was only six hours since they’d left, but she looked like she’d been beat all to hell and running on caffeine and no sleep for six weeks. “Lucy,” was all she said.

It was all she needed to say.

Amy was lying on a cot in the underground bunker where Denise had hidden them. Jiya was holding her hand. Amy’s face was pale, and Flynn, when he caught Wyatt’s eye, carefully shook his head.

Lucy grabbed Amy’s other hand, sinking down onto the bed. “You promised you’d stay safe.”

“I—I had—to keep them from shooting—Mason,” Amy managed.

Wyatt realized that Mason wasn’t there, either. He looked at Flynn.

Flynn rubbed at his eyes, then turned to Rufus. “Let’s take a walk,” he said, his voice rough.

Lucy stroked her sister’s hair. “Stay with me, honey, it’s okay, just stay with me.”

“I hate to tell you—this—Lucy—but your dad’s—a real asshole.”

Lucy laughed around a sob. “He’s not my dad. Henry is. You’re my family. You’re my only family, Amy, you have to stay, stay with me.”

“’m scared,” Amy whispered. Tears leaked out the corners of her eyes.

“Don’t be. Don’t be.” Lucy gripped her hand tighter. So, Wyatt noticed, did Jiya. “You’re going to say right here with me. There’s nothing to be scared of, Amy. I love you. You’re going to say right here with me.”

Wyatt had seen this before. Too many times.

He took Jiya by the shoulders and guided her out of the way, then pulled Lucy into his arms as she screamed.

* * *

Flynn wasn’t sure why he was the only other person Lucy would respond to besides Wyatt, but he wasn’t complaining. If he could help, in some small way, to give Lucy any kind of peace, then he wanted to try.

He took the bottle of vodka away from where she’d hidden it under her bed. That caused a big fight, but he wasn’t going to let her become an alcoholic. He’d seen that with his father and he wasn’t going to let it happen here.

They stayed up late, talking, and he’d carry her to her room and tuck her in after she’d fallen asleep on the couch. They watched movies together silently, until Lucy passed out, her head on his shoulder.

If Wyatt minded Flynn spending more time with Lucy, he wasn’t complaining. He was the only other person Lucy was really speaking to. When Lucy burst into tears, Wyatt would hug her and hold her. Wyatt gave her pep talks before they would go onto the Lifeboat if he was the one staying behind, just as Flynn would do the same if he was the one stuck in the bunker.

Little by little, Lucy began to laugh again. Began to join in on conversations, to sleep naturally, to take command during missions.

But that shadow never left her eyes, and Flynn would’ve given anything—torn time apart—to take it away.

Just like he would’ve torn time apart—and was ready and willing to—if it got his family back.

* * *

“Think about it.” Wyatt watched Flynn pacing up and down in the room they shared.

Technically there were two beds in the room, but they’d pushed them together almost immediately.

Rufus and Jiya had finally made a move—or, well, Jiya had—after Rufus, Wyatt, and Lucy gotten stranded during the French and Indian War and they nearly hadn’t made it home, so now Rufus and Jiya shared a room.

That had been the night that he and Flynn had first had sex. In the wake of nearly losing Flynn, nearly never making it back, everything that he’d been scared about admitting had just seemed… inconsequential.

_Fuck me, _he’d whispered, and Flynn had asked him if he was sure about fifty times before he’d actually done anything about it, and then Flynn had tried to play catcher and Wyatt had caught his wrist and gone _no, I said fuck me_, and after that Flynn had finally gotten with the program and, well, Wyatt sure hadn’t been walking straight the next day, that was for certain.

He’d been on top, but really it had felt more like Flynn was just holding him as Wyatt had whimpered and shook, overwhelmed, clinging, feeling everything inside him fall apart.

Lucy had her own room. The only time Wyatt had been in it was when he was helping her get to bed or helping hold the doors open so that Flynn could carry her to bed.

“I’m thinking about it,” Wyatt said, still watching Flynn. “We can’t travel on our own timeline, you know that. That’s what drove Stanley insane.”

“No, but we could go back in time and undo Rittenhouse’s existence. Undo their plans, so that they’re not powerful enough—so that they never even exist.”

“That would mean destroying America.”

“Rittenhouse and America are intrinsically connected,” Flynn snapped. He turned to face Wyatt. “To get rid of a cancer you have to attack the body. How is this any different?”

“It wouldn’t even be a guarantee that we could get your family back!”

“Don’t you want Jess back?”

“Of—of course I do.” He and Lucy had argued about his feelings for Jess. His lingering guilt. Especially in the beginning, when he was still living with her and Amy and he and Lucy had thought that maybe—well. Maybe. She insisted he needed to move on, and, well, Wyatt knew she was just saying the things that Flynn was too kind to say.

But then, Flynn couldn’t judge. Flynn couldn’t call Wyatt out for the wedding ring on his finger when Flynn was still wearing his own.

“We can save the people we love.”

“Not like this,” Wyatt replied. “I’m sorry, but just—recklessly going through the past and changing whatever? While Rittenhouse is doing the same with the Mothership? No. It’ll never work.”

Flynn snapped something in Croatian and wrenched open the bedroom door.

“Where are you going?”

“To hit a punching bag.”

Wyatt heard the silent _alone_ tacked onto the end of that sentence.

Fuck.

* * *

Flynn had nightmares.

Wyatt didn’t. He just froze up in the middle of the fucking battlefield instead, that was what he did, he just got the fucking flashbacks, and Lucy had to talk him out of it, and he broke down and cried into her shoulder afterwards, yeah, that was what he did, because he was fucking useless.

But Flynn—Flynn had nightmares.

Wyatt got good at predicting them, the minute changes in Flynn’s body alerting him. He would sit up and get some water and wait until Flynn’s eyes opened.

Usually, Flynn didn’t want to talk. They’d do other things instead. Wyatt knew that Flynn felt guilty for it afterwards, but Wyatt didn’t mind. He’d give his body a thousand, a hundred thousand times if that was what Flynn needed to feel alive, and grounded, and to chase the shadows away for a time.

When Flynn wanted to talk was usually after getting Lucy to bed. She was burning the candle at both ends—her and Rufus, who was always up tinkering with things. Figuring out a way to add a fourth seat in the Lifeboat. He never said it out loud, but they all knew—it was for Mason.

One night, they tucked Lucy in, and closed the door softly behind her, and then Wyatt tramped back into the living area to clean up the beers, and Flynn said from behind him, “Sometimes I wish I could just… let go.”

Wyatt paused. Turned and looked back at him.

Flynn looked the personification of defeated. He shrugged tiredly as if to say _what do you want from me?_

“I felt that way,” Wyatt replied. “All the time, after Jess. Even when I was living with Lucy and Amy. We’d have these arguments—this one time, Amy sprayed water at us like we were alley cats.”

_I always felt that way until I met you._

Usually, he was the one asking Flynn for advice. Flynn was about seven years older than Wyatt, and it wasn’t a whole lot, once you were in your thirties and forties. But it felt like Flynn had twenty years’ more experience, more wisdom, more everything than Wyatt did.

Now, though, Flynn seemed to be the one looking to Wyatt for answers, and Wyatt realized that Flynn… Flynn couldn’t always be the strong one.

“What stopped you from doing it?” Flynn asked. “Just letting go?”

_You_. The words stuck in his throat. _I found something to live for instead of something to die for._

“I found something to fight for,” Wyatt answered instead.

His cowardice burned in his throat like acid. Like two fingers shoved down his mouth. Like his father’s sour breath.

“Figure out what you’re fighting for,” Wyatt said. “Then you’ll be okay.”

Flynn stared at him as Wyatt busied himself cleaning up the bottles and glasses and plates, and Wyatt tried not to let any of it fall through his shaking fingers.

* * *

The first time Flynn said it, Wyatt was pretty sure Flynn thought he was asleep. They were tangled up in bed and Flynn was tracing his fingers down the slope of Wyatt’s shoulder, his breath warm on Wyatt’s ear.

The second time, they were in the middle of a fight about how reckless and possibly suicidal one or both of them were, Wyatt couldn’t even remember, and Flynn just yelled it in his face like a man on the witness stand, at the executioner’s block, unable to hold it back and needing it to be heard.

The third time was moments later, soft, right against Wyatt’s lips.

_I love you._

He never made Wyatt feel like shit for not saying it back.

* * *

The thing was, he knew that Flynn was in love with Lucy.

The sorry bastard had been in love with her almost since the first moment they’d met. Definitely since their first argument over how to tackle the _Lusitania _issue. Wyatt couldn’t blame the guy, though. Not when Wyatt was also a pathetic moth to Lucy’s soft, warm flame.

And Lucy—well. Lucy looked at Flynn in this way that was like she was entering an art museum and seeing Michelangelo’s work for the first time, a little in awe that something, someone, like this could exist.

Wyatt understood.

So he just… accepted that Flynn and Lucy would get their shit together eventually and prepared to leave himself out of it.

He pulled away a little, to prepare himself. He stayed on his side of the bed and didn’t cuddle. He stopped sitting next to Flynn on the couch, and just tried to wean himself away from Flynn’s touch in general.

What he hadn’t counted on was Flynn noticing. Or caring.

“Okay.” They were in the bedroom, and Flynn was grabbing clothes to head to the shower. “What’s wrong.”

“Why would anything be wrong?” Wyatt asked.

“You’re acting like I’m going to hit you or something, you won’t even sit next to me on the couch anymore.” Flynn put his hands on his hips, which was annoyingly distracting when he was shirtless and wearing nothing but his loose sweats. “Is this—look, Wyatt, we all go at our own pace—”

“This isn’t because of the gay thing!” Wyatt snapped. “I’m just… y’know, I get this is just a… an intermediate thing.”

“A what?”

“A stopover.”

“You think that I think of you as a stopover.” Flynn shook his head like Wyatt was being ridiculous. “A stopover on the way to what?”

Wyatt could feel his face burning. “Lucy.”

Flynn stared at him, his hands dropping from his hips. “Are you—” He turned away for a second, hand over his mouth, then turned back. “You’re serious.”

“You’re in love with her. And I know how she… she looks at you.”

Flynn blinked at him a few times. “So you just decided that you could read my mind, and knew what I was feeling and thinking, and made a decision for the both of us. All without talking to me about it.”

…well when he put it like that it sounded ridiculous. And like a dick move.

Flynn walked over, poking Wyatt in the chest. “I have put up with your bullshit for months, Wyatt. All your crises. Because I love you. Stupidly and in vain, apparently. I—yes, all right, I love Lucy. I’ve loved her… this whole time. But if she wanted to be with me, I wouldn’t dump you. We would talk, and we would negotiate something, because I can, and I do, love two people at once, equally. But I wasn’t going to bring it up because I didn’t think she was interested and oh, hey, I had my hands a little full dealing with your mess.”

He stepped away, grabbing his clothes. “You want to find an excuse to give this, us, up? Fine. You’ve been coming up with excuse after excuse ever since we started. But you don’t get to make all the decisions in a relationship. That’s not how relationships work.”

Wyatt’s throat constricted as Flynn stormed out.

* * *

He walked up to Flynn in the shower. Flynn was just… standing there, one hand braced on the tile, head hanging down. Like he was trying to drown memories out. “I’m sorry.”

Flynn spluttered a little, surprised, and then looked up, pushing the hair back out of his face. “What?”

“Just give me one last chance. Please. I’m sorry, I—you’re right, I should’ve talked to you, I’m not—this is why I screwed up with Jess, I never just swallowed my damn pride and talked to her, I always had to be right. But I—I don’t want to end us, if you don’t want to. I just… I thought… if you liked Lucy, how could you keep wanting me?”

Flynn stared at him for a moment. Then he shook his head. “_Liebling_. You’re not second best. You’re not a consolation prize.”

Wyatt’s face burned. He looked away.

Flynn reached out, dripping wet still but Wyatt didn’t give a rat’s ass about that, and slowly dragged his thumb over Wyatt’s mouth, the curve of his jaw. “I’ve said it this whole time, and I’ve meant it.”

The three little words that Flynn said so easily, that Wyatt never could.

It felt like his soul was rising up in his chest to fly out of his mouth and he grabbed Flynn, kissing him. “I love you. I love you, I do, I love you, I love you, I love—”

“You don’t have to say it.” There was a chuckle lurking at the edges of Flynn’s voice, his hands falling to Wyatt’s hips.

Wyatt bumped their noses together. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I love you.”

After—long after, the both of them pink-skinned from the shower, aching pleasantly—Wyatt curled up against Flynn, and stayed firmly on Flynn’s side of the bed all night.

Their next mission was the _Titanic_, and not exactly… well, it had been a rough one. Amy had always loved the _Titanic _as a kid, for some reason, and Lucy really struggled. Afterwards she was all alone on the couch, and Flynn went to her.

Wyatt made himself scarce.

He didn’t know what they said to each other. He just knew when the bedroom door opened and Flynn led Lucy inside, and helped her climb into bed in between them, and Wyatt curled around her, holding her hand. Flynn wrapped himself around her from behind, and they just held her, all night.

After that, Lucy was just… with them. It was all of them. Wyatt was still terrified at first, scared that Flynn would in spite of his promises grow tired of Wyatt and only want Lucy, but instead it just… worked. And Lucy was so soft with him, and would gently stroke her fingers across his cheek to wake him up in the mornings, and kiss him like a dream, and Wyatt thought—he thought that now, maybe—they could all finally be happy, in spite of their losses and their pain.

How stupid of him.

* * *

They were with Al Capone when they heard it.

“What did he say?” Flynn asked, and Lucy knew that tone, knew it like the back of her hand, like she knew every single one of Flynn’s intonations by now.

“Something about a summit in D.C. in 1954.”

“Did you know about this?” Lucy asked the others.

Flynn stared at Capone, his eyes bright and red-rimmed. They had been helping Capone evade the FBI using his taxes, because Capone was a bastard but he was also one of the few people standing up to Rittenhouse in his time.

She hated how she was running through the thin paper bags of history and ripping them apart, tearing them into pieces and rearranging them like trying to cram the wrong puzzle pieces together. She hated how nothing felt certain anymore, and she felt like she was starting to doubt her own life, her own experiences, her own self.

She was tired. So very tired. And she knew Flynn was, too.

And tired soldiers lost battles. They lost wars.

They needed to end this.

Wyatt—stubborn, black and white Wyatt—saw it differently. Lucy wasn’t sure what she saw anymore. She wanted to believe that there were other ways. That they could still be the good guys, somehow, that they didn’t have to resort to the same tactics used against them.

But she could also feel something angry and hard-edged and vicious churning in her gut like a parasite, eating away at her, and she wanted to unleash it.

Wyatt and Flynn, predictably, were arguing about it. In fact they were still arguing about it when they got out of the Lifeboat in the bunker, as Jiya and Denise quickly moved out of the way of the two men as they stormed past.

“I hate to interrupt the love fest, here,” Jiya said. “But, um, the Mothership jumped again. To Washington D.C., 1954. And… and I think Cahill jumped with them. If the chatter I’m hearing from Mason Industries is right.”

“What’s 1954, Lucy?” Denise asked, her voice quiet but sharp.

“That’s what Capone was talking about, some Rittenhouse summit.”

“Flynn figures it gets all those Rittenhouse dicks in one place, takes them out once and for all.” Wyatt sounded exhausted and pissed.

Flynn put his hands on his hips, which was honestly the least straight thing Lucy had ever seen him do and she’d watched him fuck a man for about two months now. “You know this would end things, Christopher. Cahill’s going to go in there and have the entire organization eating out of the palm of his hand. We’ll get the past and the present dealt with all at once.”

“You don’t _know_ that!” Wyatt snapped.

“Just one more mission, you’ve trusted me to make decisions like this before, Christopher—”

“Not like this—”

“Could we put it to a vote?” Rufus suggested.

Denise slammed her hand down on the table and everyone jumped—except Flynn, who was too busy glaring at her. “I am not authorizing some kind of—mass slaughter.”

“What if they deserve it?” Jiya said. “They’ve been fucking up our world, our lives, for decades. Centuries! And where are they going to stop? What if they go even further back in time? Roanoke? Salem? They could hop across to Europe, hit up the Crusades even, we don’t know! Just because this was all started in the Revolutionary War doesn’t mean that they won’t go beyond that. We’ve spent all this time getting our rights, our liberties thwarted by a bunch of old white men and I know that’s not news to anyone but did any of us really know how bad it was? Things are shit enough and they’re making it even worse! I say they deserve it! How many slaves did they kill, how many black people did they lynch, how many Native Americans did they force to walk until they dropped dead?”

“But we’re not them!” Lucy burst out.

They all turned to stare at her. Flynn looked like she’d seized his heart in a clawed fist.

“Not like this, we can’t…” Lucy took gulping breaths. Her claustrophobia was always buzzing in the back of her head in the bunker but it was rarely this bad. “We can’t be like them. If we do this, if we kill them all, then we’re just like them and I can’t—I can’t be that. I can’t do that. I can’t.” She looked at Flynn. “Flynn, I can’t, I’m sorry, I—I can’t, I can’t…”

Lucy realized, dimly, that she was hyperventilating, but she couldn’t seem to get herself to stop. Flynn crossed to her and pulled her in. “Breathe with me, in and out, it’s okay.”

Wyatt went to the kitchen to get her some water, all animosity set aside as the two men—_her_ two men—helped her.

“We just jumped,” Rufus said. “We need to rest. Please. We’ll take the Lifeboat in the morning, we know the exact time and location they jumped to, it’s not like we’re racing cars.”

Denise nodded. “Get rest, all of you. If this is a summit, then it’s political maneuvering, not just setting off a bomb. Cahill will want a few days to prepare, to make friends, make himself known. We can afford a night’s rest. You four will jump in the morning.”

Lucy wanted to cry. They had just jumped—and not even a proper rest—and then they had to jump again.

It was too much. She felt like a bridge buckling under too much weight.

They were losing the war, but more than that—she felt like she was losing her mind.

* * *

Wyatt and Flynn whisper-argued in the bathroom as Lucy lay asleep in the bedroom.

“Just one more mission,” Flynn said, drying off his hair with a towel. “That’s all I asked.”

“One more mission where you could get yourself killed,” Wyatt replied, washing his hands and glaring over his shoulder at Flynn through the mirror.

“All of Rittenhouse in one room!” Flynn snapped, flipping the towel over his shoulder. “We could end this!”

“At what cost!?”

“As if you wouldn’t do it if it would bring Jess back.”

“Y’know what, Flynn? I’m not sure that I would.”

Flynn ran his tongue over his bottom lip, staring at Wyatt. “Oh?”

Wyatt felt the tears burning his eyes and he quickly looked down. “Yeah, you’re right, I would’ve given anything to have Jess back, once. She was—whatever I feel, or felt, about her, she didn’t deserve to die like that. You know I laughed, when the cops told me she’d been strangled? I mean, I broke down into this fuckin’ hysterical laugh, I sounded like a lunatic. And I couldn’t tell them that it was because—because it was so close to how she’d killed my dad. And the fucking irony of that.

“She deserved better. So much better. And I want to right that wrong, but not at the cost of—not at the cost of you. Being separated from you. I… I wanted to die, after I lost Jess. I did. For ages. I think Lucy fuckin’ wrote about it in her journal at one point, I was fucking obsessed with her. For a while I thought this one guy, serial killer, he killed three other women—that he’d done it, and I actually nearly broke into his prison cell to kill him. I could’ve done it, too, but Dave talked me down.

“But now I—now I have something to live for.” Wyatt looked up into Flynn’s face through the mirror, met his eyes. “And I—I wouldn’t… no. Not if it meant I might lose you, leave you.”

Flynn sighed, fingering the towel. Wyatt turned around. Flynn passed it to him, letting Wyatt use it to dry his hands.

“I have to bring them back,” he said.

Rage bubbled up in Wyatt the way that it did sometimes, sharp and dangerous—but not just for those around him, but for him. A blade with a handle that cut just as badly. “Are we just not good enough, then?” he asked. “Are we just not—you want to bring them back still, and I—I’d give up Jess for you, I would, I have, I gave her up, for you, and for Lucy, and you can’t do the same? All this time, and you love them more than you love us.”

Flynn looked like he’d been slapped, and Wyatt regretted the words, but it was too late. They were out there. And the ugly truth of it was, he believed them.

Jealousy seethed in him, the whole time he thought of Lorena. Thought about how reckless Flynn was, more and more reckless each mission, determined to end Rittenhouse and bring them back.

“How can you say that you love us?” Wyatt whispered. “When you’ll give us up for them? When all you care about is getting her back?”

Flynn stared at Wyatt for a long moment. “I don’t expect you to understand,” he said at last.

“Damn right I don’t.”

Flynn walked over and caught Wyatt’s elbows in his hands, making Wyatt grab onto Flynn’s elbows in turn. Flynn pressed his forehead against Wyatt’s, breathing deep like he was breathing Wyatt in. “Do you trust me?”

Wyatt swallowed. “I don’t know… if I know how to trust.”

“You trust Lucy.”

“That’s Lucy.”

“Why not me, then?”

Wyatt didn’t have an answer for that.

Flynn kissed him, and Wyatt realized they were both crying. “Let’s go to bed.”

“They say don’t ever go to bed angry.”

“I’m not angry, are you?”

Wyatt considered. “I’m… I’m tired.”

Flynn started to walk away, then reversed course, pulling him in and crushing Wyatt to him. “I love you. I _love _you, I love _you_.”

Wyatt clung back. “_Volim te_.” It was the only Croatian that he knew.

* * *

A few hours later, Wyatt woke up feeling oddly cold.

Lucy was across the bed, turned towards him, or rather towards the empty space in between them, one arm flung out like it had once been draped over someone.

Wyatt sat up carefully, blinking the sleep from his eyes. Flynn’s insomnia kicking in again…?

…Flynn’s jacket wasn’t on the chair. His boots weren’t by the door.

_Shit_.

Wyatt slid out of bed, grabbing his gun and rushing out into the hall. “Flynn!” he hissed.

The alarm went off as the Lifeboat started to turn on.

“No!”

Wyatt ran for the living room in his pajamas, ready to shoot Flynn in the leg if that was what it took, ready to do anything—

Flynn was just closing the Lifeboat door when Wyatt skidded to a halt. “Garcia, don’t you dare, don’t you fucking—”

“I’m sorry,” Flynn replied, and then the door slid shut.

Wyatt ran for the steps up, ready to yank the door back open, dropping his gun—the Lifeboat whirled to life—he got halfway up the steps—

The Lifeboat was sucked into warp and Wyatt was thrown backwards.

He landed hard on his back, the wind knocked out of him, pain radiating out from his spine and lungs.

“Wyatt!”

Lucy collapsed beside him, yanking at him. “What—are you okay, what—”

“Son of a bitch,” Rufus said, staring down at the controls on the console. “He programmed the Lifeboat, he’s doing it, he’s going to 1954.”

“We can’t let him,” Wyatt croaked. His head was dizzy.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Rufus replied. “Let me just get our spare time machine that we keep in the other room, just haven’t mentioned it until now, and we’ll chase right after him.”

Wyatt staggered to his feet. “There has to be—something, can’t you—can you shut it down?”

“Shut it down?”

“Recall it?”

“Even if I could,” Rufus snapped impatiently, as Jiya got on the phone in the kitchen to call Denise, “do you really think that would work? He could just be stuck in between time and space, and—I don’t even want to think about all the ramifications of that.”

God, everything hurt, that was a hell of a kick the Lifeboat had.

As if he’d summoned it, wind blew through the bunker, making Wyatt stumble—and the Lifeboat appeared again.

“No,” Lucy whispered softly.

Wyatt ran forward even though his equilibrium was still off, shoving the steps into place and dashing up them to yank the door open.

It was empty.

“He sent it back,” Lucy said, her voice hushed. “He must have—just hit the—and jumped out—”

“Fuck, no,” Wyatt snarled. “We’re going after him.”

“Denise will be here in twenty minutes,” Jiya said.

“That’s twenty minutes too late, we’re going now.”

Lucy scrambled up the steps after him. “Rufus, come on!”

Rufus stood there for a minute, torn, then nodded. He grabbed Jiya, kissing her—some words were exchanged between them but Wyatt couldn’t hear—and then Rufus was hurrying up to join them.

“The Lifeboat will have a log of the last place it went, the coordinates—that’s how he was able to reverse-program it to come back here.” Rufus slid into his seat while Lucy closed the door. “I can do that now to get us to where he is.”

“Do it.” Wyatt knew they were rushing in blind but they had—they had to, he couldn’t lose Flynn, he couldn’t.

He couldn’t lose the person who felt like home.

“Do we even know where this summit is taking place?” Lucy asked as they stole some clothes in 1954.

“The capitol building?”

Lucy gave him a _don’t be obtuse_ look.

They managed to find Ethan Cahill—Lucy’s grandfather, Benjamin’s father—Lucy’s idea, actually, and a good one. He was at a gay bar, which was simultaneously hugely uncomfortable for Wyatt and hugely comforting, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to run away as fast as he could or stay and get a drink and ask questions.

Ethan’s face when he learned Lucy was his granddaughter was… it made Wyatt’s chest constrict. It reminded him of Gramps and reminded him of all the time he’d wished his father would look at him with some… some shred of affection. Ethan looked at Lucy the way Wyatt had imagined his mother looked at him, in his childhood daydreams where he took off and found her.

Only Flynn knew about those.

_“She’d be better, y’know? She’d be clean. And she’d cry and say I’d grown so big and say that she had always wanted to come and find me, but she was scared of Dad and she wanted to be clean for me, y’know, get off meth for her kid, and I’d say it was okay and I understood.”_

Flynn hadn’t said anything. Flynn had always known when words were useless. Wyatt appreciated that.

For his granddaughter, Ethan was ready to spill everything. He told them where the summit was, and when, and Lucy…

Wyatt could see the war in her eyes. The war between telling Ethan to go or stay away.

“You should call in sick,” Lucy said at last.

Ethan shook his head. “Rittenhouse won’t accept that.”

“Then leave Rittenhouse.”

Ethan stared at her for a long moment, like he was memorizing the lines of her face, trying to guess what she looked like as a child, as a baby. “If I leave Rittenhouse, will you be born?”

Lucy’s hand found Wyatt’s and gripped it tight. “Probably not.”

Ethan reached out, gently cupping her cheek, a fatherly gesture. Lucy looked as though she might shatter like glass, and Wyatt knew she was thinking about Henry Wallace. “Then I need to stay.”

“I got a lead on Flynn,” Rufus told them after they met up again. “Tall accented guy saying he’s from the plumbing company.”

“Summit’s almost started,” Wyatt said. “We’re running out of time.”

They had the location, but where was Flynn? What was he doing? Sniping? Planting a bomb? Poison?

The answer ended up being unloading a shit ton of C4 underneath the building.

Wyatt was running towards the entrance to the basement when the blast hit, blowing him backwards again for the second time in twenty-four hours. He felt warm blood trickling down his forehead as he got up onto his hands and knees. “Lucy!?”

“I’m okay!” Rufus was farther back and had only just staggered, but Lucy had fallen back against a wall.

“Run, go where it’s safe! I got this!” Wyatt managed to get to his feet.

“But—”

“I’ll find him!” Wyatt turned and headed for the inferno and the wreckage.

“Flynn!” He couldn’t see him but he had to be somewhere, he had to be—

A dark figure was on the ground, arching and twisting in pain.

Wyatt ran for it. “Flynn!”

There was blood, a lot of it, sliding down Flynn’s temple, down from his nose, the corners of his mouth. Wyatt slid to his knees, kicking up dirt. “Flynn. _Garcia_.”

Flynn coughed, the movement shaking his entire body as Wyatt hauled him up into his lap.

“Just relax,” Wyatt said. Flynn coughed more, trying to speak. “No, no, just relax. Hey. I’m here.”

_We can save the people we love_. Flynn had said that to him, once. And once, Wyatt had believed him. But now—now another person he loved was in his arms and dying and Wyatt couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t do anything.

“I… I can’t…”

Wyatt curled over Flynn, around him, as if there was something Wyatt could shield him from. All around them, the fire burned. “Just relax,” he croaked. “I’m—I’m here. Garcia. I’m here.”

Flynn managed to turn his face into Wyatt’s chest and Wyatt felt a sob start to well up in response. He gripped Flynn’s hand, gripped it hard as he could, willing, _willing_ some of his own strength to pass into Flynn, to pass some of his own life force into Flynn’s body, as if they were in fucking Dungeons & Dragons or some shit where that was actually possible. He pressed their foreheads together, bending himself almost in half. “You’re okay,” he whispered. “I’m here.”

He kept saying it, over and over, until he realized that Flynn’s eyes were closed and Flynn’s hand had gone heavy and slack in his.

A dry sob wracked his body.

Heavy footsteps thudded on the dirt. “Wyatt!”

Rufus.

“We gotta go buddy. Police are on their way and whatever’s left of Rittenhouse—they’re gonna be fucking pissed, man. There’s no way they don’t know we’re behind this.”

Flynn hadn’t exactly bothered with being subtle.

“I—I know.” He did know, he did, but he didn’t want to leave Flynn, he didn’t—

“C’mon.” Rufus got his hands on Wyatt’s shoulders and practically raised him up to standing, Flynn’s body getting laid on the ground.

“We can’t just—leave him here, we can’t just—some John Doe, no, Rufus—we—”

“We can’t take him back either, Wyatt. We have. To. Go.”

Somehow, Rufus dragged him away. Wyatt couldn’t even feel his own body anymore. He’d thought Jess was bad, just seeing her body in the morgue, not even allowed to touch, cold and stiff but this—_this_—feeling the warmth fade from Flynn’s body, watching his eyes fall closed, no, this was so much worse—

They got to the Lifeboat, Lucy jogging up to them. “Where’s Flynn?”

Wyatt’s face must have said it all, because Lucy gave a terrifying scream, an odd scream that seemed to come not from her at all but somewhere in the earth around her, welling up like a banshee’s shriek, and sprinted forward towards the wreckage.

Rufus released Wyatt and grabbed Lucy, hauling her back. “No, no, Lucy, we can’t, come on, we have to get back.”

Lucy let out another scream, this one rough and raging, the roar of a tsunami. Rufus yanked her back even more ferociously. “You!” He snapped at Wyatt. “Get in the fucking Lifeboat! Lucy!” He dragged her back, ignoring Lucy’s kicks and screams. “He was my fucking friend, and he wouldn’t want either of you dead, so you are getting in here if I have to knock you out!”

Wyatt stumbled into the Lifeboat, automatically doing what he was told. Lucy was hauled in a second later. Rufus slammed the door shut and snapped Lucy’s harness into place, then sat down at the controls.

“Rittenhouse is going to be all over our asses,” he muttered.

Wyatt stared down at his hands and realized two things:

  1. They were shaking
  2. They were covered in Flynn’s blood.

* * *

Wyatt couldn’t hear Denise as she gave the mission report.

He felt like he was sitting in a pit of mud, getting in his ears, his nose, his mouth, his eyes. Everything was clogged and suffocating him.

“Flynn definitively took care of the Mothership and Cahill,” Denise said.

Lucy reached across the table and gently curled her fingers over Wyatt’s hand where it rested on the table. He didn’t want to be touched, but at the same time he couldn’t muster the ability to pull away or respond.

“But Rittenhouse still exists in the present. The summit took care of a lot of them but not all of them, which now leads me to suspect that there were others involved besides Cahill who chose to stay out of the spotlight and accepted the torch being passed down to them from someone else.”

“The women,” Jiya said. “The summit was all white men, wasn’t it?”

“White feminism likes to pretend that all women are more progressive than men,” Lucy said. “But forty percent of slave owners were white women. It’s the… the pattern of history. The men go off to war and don’t come home, so the women pick up the pieces and carry on and rebuild. The women wouldn’t have been invited to the summit but they were still Rittenhouse.”

“…which is why we didn’t all forget about Cahill when you all came back,” Denise said. “His mother, Ethan’s wife, was a part of Rittenhouse too, we can presume.”

“Do you know of any women who are a part of Rittenhouse now?” Lucy asked.

Denise shook her head. “Their membership today is unknown to us. I have no idea how many of them there are. All I know is that Flynn’s stunt might have stopped them from messing with time but they’re still powerful, and they’re angrier at us than ever.”

“…and they’ll come after the Lifeboat,” Jiya added.

Wyatt felt like black bile was rising up in his throat, squirming, alive, choking him.

“We’ve lost Mason, we’ve lost Flynn…” Rufus said slowly. “We basically just kicked the hornet’s nest for Rittenhouse and now we don’t even know who most of their members are, it could be anyone…” He looked up at all of them. “Did we just lose the war?”

Wyatt shoved his chair back, away, standing up. “Are you telling me,” he said, his voice rough, breathing harshly through his nose, “that Flynn died for _nothing_?”

The others just stared at him. Denise had that look on her face—the sad one, the kind of look that Wyatt’s grandfather had gotten on his face when Wyatt had gotten scraped up again.

Lucy reached out. “Wyatt…”

He couldn’t. He turned and stormed out of the room.

* * *

Wyatt washed his hands over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and—

Flynn used to recite Shakespeare, sometimes. Never around Rufus. It had reminded him too much of Mason. Once, he’d done Lady Macbeth. _Out, damn’d spot_.

Wyatt had never understood that until now.

He couldn’t stop thinking about—about when he’d first told Flynn that he loved him, after all of their fights and Wyatt’s stumbling and how—how Wyatt had always been the one to mess it up.

If he’d said things differently that last night, when he’d told Flynn, or accused Flynn, rather, of not loving him and Lucy as much as Lorena, if he’d done it better, somehow… would Flynn have stayed?

_Just give me one last chance_.

Flynn had stared at him, water sliding down into his eyes, and he’d—he’d nodded.

Wyatt had gotten his clothes soaking wet, kissing Flynn, but he hadn’t given a rat’s ass.

_“I love you. I love you, I love you, I love—”_

_“You don’t have to say it.”_

_“Yeah. Yeah I do. I love you.”_

Pressing the words into Flynn’s mouth, finally, finally claiming what he had been running from for so long, giving into it and feeling like nothing else in the world worked so well as this…

Wyatt stared at himself in the mirror. The empty spot over his shoulder mocked him—the spot where Flynn had always used to stand.

Rage—at the world, at himself—filled him and he viciously punched the wall, hard enough that a piece of tile broke off and clattered into the sink.

* * *

Lucy didn’t go back to drinking, but Wyatt knew that she wanted to. It was only for Flynn’s sake that she didn’t.

Wyatt was glad. He couldn’t have dragged her out of that bottle if he’d tried. He wasn’t good for her in that way, the way that Flynn had been.

Instead, Lucy wrote obsessively in her journal. Pages and pages. Staying up all night.

She didn’t speak to Denise. Lucy already somewhat blamed Denise for Amy, and now, with Flynn…

Wyatt wasn’t sure how much it was Denise’s fault, but he also knew it was easy, to blame someone outside, to have someone to hate.

He couldn’t blame Denise. He blamed himself.

He had never felt so useless in his life as he did in the next couple of weeks. Like deadweight. Replaceable. A shadow, or less than a shadow.

Denise started spending the night in the bunker. Whether it was for Wyatt, or Lucy, or both of them, he didn’t know.

She started talking to him at night. When Lucy was shut up in their room and Wyatt didn’t know how to reach her and so he just sat in the living room, wishing he could just walk into the ocean.

Flynn had liked the ocean.

Wyatt suspected that Denise stayed, and talked to him, because she felt guilty for not doing more of that before. Realizing too late that they all needed more from her than just someone who barked orders.

“Why am I here?” he asked her one night, and he knew that she knew he meant more than just… _here_.

“You were meant to be here,” Denise said. “Maybe you’re meant to survive because you’re supposed to be here, helping your friends.”

Wyatt looked up at her. “How do I do that now?”

“You find… something,” Denise said. “Something that gives you a reason to fight. Something besides Flynn, something new.”

It was such an awful parody of his own conversation with Flynn that Wyatt nearly puked.

“But it is still Flynn,” he replied. “He’s the reason I fight. To make him proud.”

“That’s all we can do, sometimes,” Denise told him, and Wyatt found himself wondering who she’d lost, and who she was remembering, with her starless night eyes.

* * *

It came to him in a burst of painful clarity.

It was half past midnight, and he was watching Rufus tinker with the controls at the large computer table. Jiya was passed out on the couch, pages of calculations on her chest. “You know what the issue is?”

“Hmm?” Rufus replied.

“We started too late. We figured it all out too late. If we’d just—gotten started sooner, known what Rittenhouse was and gotten the Mothership from them—before they could take it—”

“Yeah, sure, but that would mean traveling on our own timeline,” Rufus replied.

Wyatt tapped the table. “That’s the thing. We _can_.”

“If you want to go insane, sure.”

Wyatt just stared at him.

Rufus put down his tools and turned to face him, raising an eyebrow.

“He didn’t deserve to die.”

Rufus stared at him for a moment, his expression halfway between sympathy and sarcasm. _Of course he didn’t _mixed with _you’re right_.

“If we traveled on our own timeline… if we were smart about it… we could get to him. Get Flynn—it has to be Flynn, you know it has to be—get him to go after Rittenhouse sooner. He could do it. None of us could, but he, he could do it, and… and then it would all reset, wouldn’t it? And we’d be on top of it, and he’d… he wouldn’t die.”

Rufus looked over at Jiya, and Wyatt knew what he was thinking. _If it was Jiya’s life…_

He looked back to Wyatt. “I’ll see what I can do.”

* * *

Lucy was up, her journal in front of her, but she was just staring at a picture propped up on her desk.

It was something they’d found in a historical book. A photograph that someone had snapped of them from the women’s march where they’d met Alice Paul and saved her life. It was from right after Flynn had saved Rufus from a police officer, and the caption had said something about a riot breaking out, and how even bystanders had gotten involved.

Flynn looked handsome as always, not a hair out of place even after decking the officer who’d been attacking Rufus.

“Luce?” Wyatt whispered.

Lucy didn’t reply.

He leaned against the desk. “Hey, baby doll,” he teased, that old fake pet name from Bonnie and Clyde.

Lucy didn’t turn away. “Hey, sweetheart,” she responded, her voice thin and worn like a thread about to snap.

Wyatt dared to reach out and take her hand. They hadn’t—not since Flynn’s de—not since they’d lost him. They always left a space between them in the middle of the bed.

He knew he could explain it all, but he had to really get her attention first. And he knew the one way to do that. “Will you help me save Flynn?”

Lucy turned—away from the photo, from the journal—and looked at him. Her eyes were as red-rimmed as Wyatt’s. “What do you need me to do?”

* * *

They found the bunker.

Jiya knew they’d been sloppy, after Flynn had died. They’d risked everything, going in to try and retrieve him. She didn’t regret it—she knew that none of them did—but that didn’t change the outcome.

The bunker was under attack.

“We can’t leave,” Rufus said. “We can’t.”

“You don’t have a choice,” Jiya replied. “Look, Denise and I can hold it all down long enough—you just return to the moment that you left and pick us up.”

“We’ve never done a jump with more than four,” Rufus replied. “Five? Really? The Lifeboat’s proportions literally aren’t built for that.”

“Then drop Lucy and Wyatt somewhere else first!” Jiya snapped. “You’re changing everything anyway by going to Flynn, all right? Have a little faith.”

“How! How can I have faith?”

Lucy and Wyatt were scrambling into the Lifeboat as Denise grabbed a gun. Now was really not the time for a philosophical discussion.

“God didn’t get my family out of poverty or get me into MIT, I did,” Rufus replied. “I’m not going to just trust that He’ll work everything out for us, we need a contingency plan!”

“The door is going to buckle!” Denise yelled as she tore down the bunker hallway. “You need to launch now!”

Rufus looked like he might actually rather die here than leave. Jiya grabbed his face, kissing him. “Go, go now.”

She shoved him back and Wyatt reached out of the Lifeboat, grabbing Rufus by the back of the collar and yanking with all of his might. Behind her, Jiya heard the sound of the bunker door being blast open and Denise yelling, gunfire echoing.

Rufus looked agonized as he stumbled backwards into the Lifeboat. Jiya shoved the stairs away from the machine, then sprinted for the computer controls.

The Lifeboat began to whirl, faster and faster, with an ominous creaking. Jiya heard pounding footsteps marching ever-closer.

They’d gotten Denise.

She wrenched open the control panels on the computer and grabbed a lighter from the kitchen drawer, tearing out wires as the Lifeboat spun even faster and vanished.

“Stop her!”

Jiya flicked on the lighter and thrust it into the exposed computer wires just as pain exploded in her back.

The wires caught fire with a loud crackle and _fwoom_, the entire panel going up in flame. Destroying everything.

Jiya slid to the floor. She couldn’t—her lungs, they wouldn’t—she—

Someone strode in. A redhead. Jiya’s vision blurred, she couldn’t see the person’s face.

It was all up to Lucy, Rufus, and Wyatt now. They had to change things. Get Flynn to start it all sooner, to set the ball in motion, take the Mothership before Rittenhouse did.

But Jiya had faith.

Her vision dimmed, and right before it all went black she thought she saw—colors, odd colors that she’d never seen before, forbidden colors.

She had faith.

The forbidden colors engulfed her.

* * *

Lucy walked into the bar, her heart pounding. This wasn’t exactly a good area of town, and so most people who glanced at her probably thought the _estrangeira _was taking careful, measured steps because of that—but no.

She had to get this right. She had one shot only to convince Flynn to believe her, to believe her crazy tale and take the fight to Rittenhouse sooner.

They had waited too long. All of them, trying to figure out their one piece of the puzzle, struggling in the dark, slowly making their way to each other. No. It had to be fast. They had to get a team together. Who knew what was being changed and erased—what people and what connections they were losing.

It had to be Flynn. Only he could stop it. He had always been the catalyst.

_You are the one thing we couldn’t afford to lose._

No, no, too much, it was too much. The man was mourning the still-fresh death of his wife and daughter, and a line like that—it showed too much of Lucy’s own raw heart.

_You saved me in a car crash, it was the first time I ever saw you—_

No, who knew if that was even a thing in this timeline? She couldn’t risk guessing about too much of the past, not when she was meddling with her own timeline and possibly turning everything into a chaotic loop they could never untangle, a prison of repeating and conflicting timelines that would kill reality itself.

She took a deep breath, then another.

There he was.

It was like someone had reached down her throat and snatched the air right out of her lungs with a gnarled, clawed hand, talons ripping it free and leaving her with nothing but the ability to sway on the spot, her very atoms trembling.

He looked like shit, with stubble and messy hair and a frail, gaunt look to him, his shirt hanging loose off his body, and too many shot glasses in front of him. The Flynn that she lo—knew, he had an occasional drink but he was never drunk.

Lucy steeled herself. Remembered all the times Flynn had called her brave, all the times he’d told her that she was strong.

She walked up to him and sat down next to him. “We need to talk.”

“_No falo ingles_.” Typical. Of course, if she’d been him, in his situation, she wouldn’t have trusted a strange woman walking up to her, either.

“I know you speak English… Flynn.”

Flynn jerked, sad, haunted eyes turning to her, a kind of horror entering them. “How do you know my name?”

“I know everything about you. I know your mother is dead. I know that you thought you were supposed to follow in your father’s footsteps even though you weren’t sure that you wanted to.”

Flynn’s gaze shifted from horror to confusion. Lucy wasn’t sure what made her mention his parents instead of the obvious, instead of Lorena and Iris, but perhaps that was the point. He would expect her to mention the family he had just lost. Anyone who looked him up could know that. But who could know about Asher’s influence on Flynn’s decision to join the war for independence? Who could know the tight-knit and yet bittersweet bond between Flynn and his mother?

“Do you want to know how I know?” Lucy asked.

She pulled out her journal, flipping open to a page—a page where she’d saved the note Flynn had left.

The last note he’d ever left them.

“…that’s my handwriting,” Flynn said. His voice was awed, and afraid, and angry. He looked up at her. “I didn’t write that.”

“Not yet.” Lucy closed the journal. “But you will.” She flipped to another page, this one a drawing of an engine, one that Maria had done. Stiv had managed to get to Flynn's house and save a few, shipping them to him, and after Flynn had—well, Lucy had saved them in her journal.

Flynn's face as he saw those drawings… Lucy was sure he only reason he wasn't bursting into tears was that he had cried all that he could, and there was now nothing left.

She wanted to reach out and touch him, to take his hand—no, his face, to clutch his face in her hands once again, feel the curve and angle of it beneath her fingers. “I know what you’re really meant to do, Flynn, and it’s not drink yourself to death in grief.”

“Why should I believe anything you tell me?” Flynn challenged, a bit of that old fire sparking in his voice.

Lucy forced her voice to stay steady. “Because I know about Rittenhouse.”

That seemed to finally stun Flynn into silence.

Lucy passed him the journal. “Take this. It has everything that we’ve been through, every mission we went on, how we met, how we tried to fight them. I know that you were looking into Mason’s finances, and you found the name Rittenhouse, and the next thing your family was killed.”

Flynn seemed hesitant to take the journal, so Lucy pressed it into his hands. “Please. We were too slow this time. It took us too long to come together and stop them. Rittenhouse—they’re winning. The journal explains everything. And it has—it has to be you who stops them.”

“Why?” Flynn’s voice was raspy, scraped from the bottom of his throat.

“Because you’re a hero,” Lucy whispered. “Because—because if you do this—I know you’re grieving but this is the only way we can save the people we love. I believe that. It was all that you fought for, and I know that this way—this way, we can do it. You can do it.” She could feel her resolve cracking, the water pushing up against the dam, threatening to push through and sweep her away. “Because you’re—because I—”

He could see it in her eyes. She knew it. “Who are you?”

“I’m Lucy. Lucy Preston.”

“Lucy.”

She loved how he said her name. She always had.

Flynn repeated his question. “Who are you?”

_Who are you to me?_

Lucy shook her head. “Just read it,” she whispered. “And… and no matter what, Garcia, just—just please—remember that—” _That I love you. It hurts to breathe without you. _“—that you are the best of us.”

She leaned in, kissing him—he turned his face a little, in surprise or something else, she didn’t know—and she caught the right corner of his mouth. Lucy almost laughed hysterically.

_…her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner_.

_Peter Pan_ had been one of the books that Carol had read to Lucy and Amy when they were children. Lucy had always been haunted by that quote, wondering what it meant, but now… _sweet mocking mouth_, that was Flynn all over.

She pulled back and looked one last time into Flynn’s eyes. They looked almost completely blue with his tired blue shirt and the bar lighting. Stormy sea blue, drowning blue, impossible green-tinged blue.

“Take the Mothership, before Rittenhouse can get it. They’re already so close. In 2016 they’ll seize it, two years, that should be enough. It’s all in the journal. Please.”

“You really believe it,” Flynn said, his voice hushed. He was no longer staring at her with fear, but like she was something more than human. A vision. An angel emerged from dust. “That we can—we can save our families.”

_That’s what I’m doing here. _“Yes. You can.” _You._

Flynn reached up, his thumb brushing against her mouth, and Lucy broke.

She pulled away, leaving the journal resting on the bar in his other hand, and backed a few steps down the row, nearly tripping, before she stumbled around and burst out of the bar and onto the street where the air felt too thin.

It was done.

* * *

Wyatt wanted to be there. He wanted to see Flynn one last time—to tell him that he was sorry, that he should’ve done better, gotten through to Flynn somehow—he wanted to walk into that bar and touch him, feel the slope of Flynn’s shoulder, the curve of it under Wyatt’s hand—

But it wasn’t on him.

He could never persuade Flynn to go on this… this quest against Rittenhouse. It was practically a suicide mission. He and Flynn were good for each other, they challenged each other, they forced each other to examine themselves and reaffirm their convictions.

But it also meant they could rub each other the wrong way. Butt heads. Be stubborn assholes, basically.

And they couldn’t afford that right now. Right now what they needed was for someone who could persuade Flynn to give up everything in pursuit of the thin, fragile hope of a better tomorrow. Someone who could talk Flynn off the ledge.

There was only one person in the world who could do that.

Lucy.

Not to mention it was her journal that she was handing off. Her journal, the one record of everything, their entire journey together, all their information, all that they knew.

There were personal anecdotes in there, too. Wyatt didn’t know what, exactly. But she’d warned him beforehand.

_It talks about us, _she’d said. _It talks about… all three of us. Intimately._

She had shown him a single passage. It was one time they’d all been together after another one of Wyatt and Flynn’s big fights.

_I don’t know if Wyatt realizes how he kisses Flynn. It’s like Wyatt’s in a fire and Flynn’s the thing that can keep him from burning. We kissed Flynn by turns, both of us were greedy for him, but I pulled back and I watched because I like watching them and I wanted to sear it in my mind and I wonder if Wyatt knows how he clings to Flynn and how he just kind of tugs until Flynn’s mouth is just devouring his. I think—Wyatt will never admit it but I think he wants to be devoured._

Yeah. Those were the kind of things that Flynn would be reading now.

He’d be reading the lines of Wyatt’s devotion before he even knew Wyatt’s face. He would know, in painful detail, the way that Wyatt exhaled shakily when Flynn sank into him, and the way that Wyatt buried his face in Flynn’s neck for comfort.

Flynn would know everything, and he would be going to meet a Wyatt who knew nothing, and all that Wyatt could do was sit there and trust that somehow, someway, the two of them would find each other in the middle.

He hoped Lucy was telling Flynn what he needed to know. Don’t let your grief consume you. You will see the people you love again, even if it’s not in the way you expect. Don’t throw your life away.

_Please, please, don’t throw your life away._

The door to the Lifeboat opened. Wyatt jumped to his feet, banging his head on the ceiling. Fuck.

“Did you—” he asked as Lucy stepped in.

The words died in his mouth as she looked up and he saw the tear tracks on her face, the unusual shine in her eyes. He knew he hadn’t bit his tongue, but he tasted blood nonetheless.

Lucy wobbled a little and Wyatt took her hand, helping her to sit down in her seat in the Lifeboat. He paused.

Flynn had always helped Lucy with her Lifeboat straps. He had from the beginning.

Wyatt leaned forward, gently tugging the straps into place, clicking the tongue into the buckle. He gave a firm yank to the strap, making sure it was all secure, then started to pull away.

Lucy caught his hand. “Wyatt.”

Rufus turned away, closing the Lifeboat door, shutting out the distant sounds of the São Paulo nightlife.

Wyatt looked into her eyes. Lucy gave him a shattered-glass smile.

“It was worth it,” she whispered, like she was at confession. “To see him again.”

Wyatt understood. It was worth—anything.

He squeezed Lucy’s hand, then let it slip through his fingers and fall away.

“Okay,” Rufus said. He grabbed the controls. “I’m gonna be honest here, I have no fucking clue what’s going to happen next. I’m locking back onto the same date and location that we left but we might come back to a timeline that’s the same, we might come back to a timeline that’s different and nobody knows what happened except us, or we might just cease to exist. Or at least these versions of us will.”

Wyatt reached out, and saw Lucy doing the same, each of them grabbing one of Rufus’s shoulders.

“We’re here,” Lucy whispered. “The three of us.”

Rufus nodded.

In the second before it started, Lucy grabbed Wyatt’s hand again, squeezing so tightly Wyatt thought he could feel his bones rearranging.

Rufus hit the thrusters.

And they jumped into light.

* * *

_2016_

Garcia Flynn’s hands shook slightly as he clipped the security ID card onto his outfit. He could barely glance at himself in the mirror, but after a deep breath, he forced himself to look up, to meet his own eyes.

Two years of planning. Two years since Lucy Preston had walked into the bar where he was drowning himself and told him she had a way to save his family.

_I know everything about you._

He knew that journal by heart, now. Everything he’d gone through. Everything that they had all done together. Everything they had all sacrificed. The mistakes, the sorrows, the joys, the victories, the failures, the losses.

Lucy had seemed so sure that it would all be enough. That he would be able to accomplish this Herculean task and steal the Mothership before Rittenhouse got to it. That he could somehow jump through time and fix everything. In her eyes, he had seen this conviction that he was something more, so much more, that he was… a hero.

Flynn didn’t know how to be a hero. He’d never been… he’d done what he felt was right. He’d done what he could to help others. But all blood ran red in the end. Did it really matter if the blood was innocent or guilty? Who was to say? He had been a good man, once, or he had tried to, but a hero? He had never been that—and especially not now.

He was going to dive deeper into the pit than ever before for this. For his family. But Lucy had said, she had promised that he would save the people he loved.

He had to cling to that.

Flynn’s hands steadied, and he straightened up.

They were going to steal a time machine.

* * *

_2023_

Wyatt woke up with tears on his pillow.

He couldn’t say why, exactly, which was odd since he normally knew when he had a nightmare, seeing as he would wake up displaced, fully in the grip of his past, and Flynn would have to talk him out of it.

This time, though, he just felt… an odd ache in his chest. A sensation of something lost, and something bitterly missed, and something finally found again.

He started to try and roll over, but there was a warm wall against his back, stopping him. The heavy arm around his waist didn’t help either.

Wyatt pressed his smile into the pillow and then reached down. His left hand found Flynn’s under the covers, squeezing it, feeling their rings clink together.

Flynn hummed, nosing at the short hair at the back of Wyatt’s neck. “You’re awake.”

Wyatt shifted onto his back, turning just enough that he could look into Flynn’s face.

Flynn gave him that lazy, close-lipped smile, the kind that he gave when his entire face was relaxed. His hair was flopping a little into his face, he had morning scruff, and there were still cobwebs in the corners of his eyes as the edge of sleep clung to him.

He was fucking gorgeous.

Flynn squeezed Wyatt’s hand, then detangled their fingers, reaching up to brush his fingers feather-light over the curve of Wyatt’s cheek and jaw. “_Guten Morgan, Schnecke_.” His eyes searched Wyatt’s. “You were crying.”

“Maybe I just missed you,” Wyatt said, his voice oddly hoarse.

“Even while you’re asleep, I’m flattered.”

“Where’s Lucy?”

“Bathroom.” Flynn bumped their noses together. “Wyatt… I was thinking, you never read the journal, did you?”

Wyatt shook his head.

“Maybe you should. Parts, at least.”

He knew, obviously, that there was personal stuff about him in it. He’d known that since Flynn had tied him to a chair and told him that Lucy wrote in her journal that Wyatt was obsessed with Jess and needed to move on. But he hadn’t ever really… needed to read it. Not really. Why would he?

“Oh?” Wyatt murmured. Flynn was shifting closer, their limbs entwining by slow but steady increments. “Why’s that?”

“It’s a little unfair, I think, that Lucy and I know and you don’t,” Flynn replied. He brushed his lips to the corner of Wyatt’s mouth. _A hidden kiss_, Wyatt remembered, according to J.M. Barrie, anyway. “How do you think I knew exactly how to kiss you?” he added.

Wyatt didn’t get a chance to answer. He was a little busy opening his mouth to Flynn’s.

“Hey,” he whispered later—much later, his mouth swollen and tongue aching from kisses. “I love you.”

Flynn rolled them so that he was no longer pinning Wyatt down, so that Wyatt was now on top, and Flynn could stare up at him with the light filtering in through the window highlighting Wyatt’s face. “I love you,” he replied, as easy as breathing, and how Wyatt had come to earn that—that easy admission, that simple declaration as casual as making coffee—he didn’t know.

Wyatt pressed their foreheads together. “I don’t know why I’m so maudlin,” he confessed. “I just—I feel really lucky, this morning, I guess. Grateful. To have you.”

Flynn kissed his nose.

Lucy emerged from the bathroom, shaking out her damp hair, wearing one of Flynn’s sweaters that she’d once again stolen. “Started without me?” she teased.

“Never,” Flynn declared as Wyatt shifted to make room.

They always started with her—literally, all of this had started with Lucy going to a bar in São Paulo and giving Flynn the journal.

Who were they, in that other timeline? Had they been together? Wyatt thought of what Flynn had said—that he should read the journal and find out. Wyatt found himself, for the first time, burning with curiosity as to what the three of them, how the three of them, had been, in that original timeline.

But then it almost… washed away from him, like dirt swirling away down the drain with a new rush of water.

What did it matter? Wyatt knew what they had been—what they were in every single timeline, no matter what, finding a way to each other again and again like planets orbiting around each other and inevitably crashing, creating the big bang all over, reforming their universe, the three of them.

They were together then. And it hadn’t been good enough, so they’d fixed it, and they were together now. Safe from Rittenhouse, for the rest of their lives.

“I was thinking,” Lucy said slowly, “of going on a trip. Like… taking a sabbatical, kind of trip. Amy and Dave could watch the dogs.”

Flynn fingered her hair, his other hand lightly tracing patterns on Wyatt’s back. “Where would we go?” he asked.

Lucy’s smile was fond, and wicked, and enchanted, all at once. “I was thinking Europe.”

“Where in Europe?”

She shook her head. “No. Europe.”

Wyatt smiled. “Europe.” He nodded. “I like it.” He looked at Flynn.

And his husband looked right back at him, and smiled, and said, “I like it too.”

Inexplicably, Wyatt thought, _welcome home_.

**Author's Note:**

> This wasn’t originally intended to be a playlist for this fic but I felt it fit, so please, have a listen and cry with me: https://letmetellyouaboutmyfeels.tumblr.com/post/186731268733/playlist-stay-a-little-longer-for-flogan
> 
> The idea of a couple of Maria’s drawings ending up in the journal comes from oldshrewsburyian, who included it in her fic ‘until the universe is open’, which you can find on Ao3.


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